This research proposes a 'temporal attention' addition for long-short term memory (LSTM) models for dengue prediction. The number of monthly dengue cases was collected for each of five Malaysian states i.e. Selangor, Kelantan, Johor, Pulau Pinang, and Melaka from 2011 to 2016. Climatic, demographic, geographic and temporal attributes were used as covariates. The proposed LSTM models with temporal attention was compared with several benchmark models including a linear support vector machine (LSVM), a radial basis function support vector machine (RBFSVM), a decision tree (DT), a shallow neural network (SANN) and a deep neural network (D-ANN). In addition, experiments were conducted to analyze the impact of look-back settings on each model performance. The results showed that the attention LSTM (A-LSTM) model performed best, with the stacked, attention LSTM (SA-LSTM) one in second place. The LSTM and stacked LSTM (S-LSTM) models performed almost identically but with the accuracy improved by the attention mechanism was added. Indeed, they were both found to be superior to the benchmark models mentioned above. The best results were obtained when all attributes were included in the model. The four models (LSTM, S-LSTM, A-LSTM and SA-LSTM) were able to accurately predict dengue presence 1-6 months ahead. Our findings provide a more accurate dengue prediction model than previously used, with the prospect of also applying this approach in other geographic areas.
This research aims to predict dengue fever cases in Malaysia using machine learning techniques. A dataset consisting of weekly dengue cases at the state level in Malaysia from 2010 to 2016 was obtained from the Malaysia Open Data website and includes variables such as climate, geography, and demographics. Six different long short-term memory (LSTM) models were developed and compared for dengue prediction in Malaysia: LSTM, stacked LSTM (S-LSTM), LSTM with temporal attention (TA-LSTM), S-LSTM with temporal attention (STA-LSTM), LSTM with spatial attention (SA-LSTM), and S-LSTM with spatial attention (SSA-LSTM). The models were trained and evaluated on a dataset of monthly dengue cases in Malaysia from 2010 to 2016, with the task of predicting the number of dengue cases based on various climate, topographic, demographic, and land-use variables. The SSA-LSTM model, which used both stacked LSTM layers and spatial attention, performed the best, with an average root mean squared error (RMSE) of 3.17 across all lookback periods. When compared to three benchmark models (SVM, DT, ANN), the SSA-LSTM model had a significantly lower average RMSE. The SSA-LSTM model also performed well in different states in Malaysia, with RMSE values ranging from 2.91 to 4.55. When comparing temporal and spatial attention models, the spatial models generally performed better at predicting dengue cases. The SSA-LSTM model was also found to perform well at different prediction horizons, with the lowest RMSE at 4- and 5-month lookback periods. Overall, the results suggest that the SSA-LSTM model is effective at predicting dengue cases in Malaysia.
To obtain seasonable and precise crop yield information with fine resolution is very important for ensuring the food security. However, the quantity and quality of available images and the selection of prediction variables often limit the performance of yield prediction. In our study, the synthesized images of Landsat and MODIS were used to provide remote sensing (RS) variables, which can fill the missing values of Landsat images well and cover the study area completely. The deep learning (DL) was used to combine different vegetation index (VI) with climate data to build wheat yield prediction model in Hebei Province (HB). The results showed that kernel NDVI (kNDVI) and near-infrared reflectance (NIRv) slightly outperform normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in yield prediction. And the regression algorithm had a more prominent effect on yield prediction, while the yield prediction model using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) outperformed the yield prediction model using Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM). The model combining LSTM algorithm and NIRv had the best prediction effect and relatively stable performance in single year. The optimal model was then used to generate 30 m resolution wheat yield maps in the past 20 years, with higher overall accuracy. In addition, we can define the optimum prediction time at April, which can consider simultaneously the performance and lead time. In general, we expect that this prediction model can provide important information to understand and ensure food security.