Impact of Human Mobility on Spread of Dengue in Sri Lanka

Human mobility plays a significant role in spatio-temporal propagation of infectious diseases. But how much of an impact does human mobility have on propagating a dengue outbreak in a dengue endemic country such as Sri Lanka? We show that a proxy value for human mobility, derived from mobile network big data, has a significant correlation with dengue incidence using past case data. Furthermore, we discuss the applicability of this proxy measure of mobility to increase accuracy of several prediction models based on machine learning techniques. These improved models can be used to do spatio-temporal forecasting of dengue outbreaks which can help medical officers and related governmental or non-governmental agencies execute preemptive measures before the outbreak occurs in actuality. Download paper here

Recommended citation: Fernando, L., Perera, A. S., Lokanathan, S., Ghouse, A., & Tissera, H. (2017). Impact of Human Mobility on Spread of Dengue in Sri Lanka. In Book of Abstracts (Oral) of 5th International Conference on Scientific Analysis of Mobile Phone datasets (NetMob) (pp. 75–77). Milan, Italy