Deep learning with LSTM networks for dengue disease forecasting and control

Abstract

Accurate forecasting of infectious disease dynamics is essential for effective public health planning and early outbreak response. Traditional statistical models and modern deep learning approaches have both been widely used for epidemiological time–series forecasting. Dengue fever remains a major public health concern in Bangladesh, where seasonal outbreaks often produce sharp and unpredictable infection spikes. Reliable forecasting models are therefore important for anticipating infection trends and supporting early intervention strategies. This study investigates the performance of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for predicting daily dengue infection counts in Bangladesh using surveillance data from 2010 to 2022. Multiple LSTM architectures were developed by varying the number of LSTM units, lookback window size, and data preprocessing strategies. A fixed time-based data split was used, with training data up to 30 September 2021 and testing on subsequent observations to avoid information leakage. The proposed LSTM models were compared with several baseline forecasting approaches, including Naive, Seasonal-Naive, and ARIMA models. Model performance was evaluated using standard forecasting metrics including Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE). Experimental results indicate that classical statistical models remain strong benchmarks for dengue forecasting. Among all evaluated models, the ARIMA(2,1,2) model achieved the best predictive performance on the test dataset with MAE of 8.40 and RMSE of 14.72. The best-performing LSTM configuration produced competitive results with MAE of 8.92 and RMSE of 15.87, outperforming simple baseline approaches such as the Naive and Seasonal-Naive models. These findings suggest that while deep learning models are capable of capturing complex temporal patterns, their advantage over well-tuned statistical models is not guaranteed for this dataset. The results highlight the importance of benchmarking deep learning models against classical time-series approaches when forecasting epidemiological data. While LSTM networks demonstrate promising performance in modeling nonlinear temporal dynamics, the ARIMA model provided the most accurate predictions for the studied dengue dataset.