Malaria Disease Distribution in Sudan Using Time Series ARIMA Model

Abstract

Malaria is widely spread and distributed in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Sudan is a sub-Saharan African country that is highly affected by malaria with 7.5 million cases and 35,000 deaths every year. The auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was used to predict the spread of malaria in the Sudan. The ARIMA model used malaria cases from 2006 to 2011 as a training set, and data from 2012 as a testing set, and created the best model fitted to forecast the malaria cases in Sudan for years 2013 and 2014. The ARIMAX model was carried out to examine the relationship between malaria cases and climate factors with diagnostics of previous malaria cases using the least Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC) values. The results indicated that there were four different models, the ARIMA model of the average for the overall states is (1,0,1)(0,1,1)¹². The ARIMAX model showed that there is a significant variation between the states in Sudan.