This paper proposes a hybrid methodology that exploits the unique strength of the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model and the support vector machines (SVM) model in forecasting seasonal time series. The seasonal time series data of Taiwan’s machinery industry production values were used to examine the forecasting accuracy of the proposed hybrid model. The forecastin...

Recently, we developed a seasonal influenza prediction system that uses an advanced data assimilation technique and real-time estimates of influenza incidence to optimize and initialize a population-based mathematical model of influenza transmission dynamics. This system was used to generate and evaluate retrospective forecasts of influenza peak timing in New York City. Here we present weekly f...

A thought experiment on atmospheric interannual variability associated with El Niño is formulated and is used to investigate the seasonal predictability as it relates to the practice of generating ensemble GCM predictions. The purpose of the study is to gain insight on two important issues within seasonal climate forecasting: (i) the dependence of seasonal forecast skill on a GCM’s ensemble siz...

The knowledge about the seasonal rainfall in some Brazilian regions is essential for agriculture and the adequate management of water resources. For this purpose, linear and nonlinear models are commonly used for seasonal rainfall prediction, while some of them are based on Artificial Neural Networks, demonstrating great potential as shown in literature. According to this tendency, this work pr...

Any initial value forecast of climate will be subject to errors originating from poorly known initial conditions, model imperfections, and by “chaos” in the sense that, even if the initial conditions were perfectly known, infinitesimal errors can amplify and spoil the forecast at some lead time. Here the latter source of error is examined using a “perfect model” approach whereby small perturbat...

A Bayesian methodology is used to assess the information content of categorical, probabilistic forecasts of specific variables derived from a general circulation model (GCM) forecast ensemble, and to combine a ‘‘prior’’ forecast (climatological probabilities of each category) with a categorical probabilistic forecast derived from a GCM ensemble to develop posterior, or ‘‘regularized’’ categoric...

Ecological and laboratory studies have demonstrated that temperature modulates West Nile virus (WNV) transmission dynamics and spillover infection to humans. Here we explore whether inclusion of temperature forcing in a model depicting WNV transmission improves WNV forecast accuracy relative to a baseline model depicting WNV transmission without temperature forcing. Both models are optimized us...

Background. It is highly cost effective to detect a seasonal trend in tuberculosis in order to optimize disease control and intervention. Although seasonal variation of tuberculosis has been reported from different parts of the world, no definite and consistent pattern has been observed. Therefore, the study was designed to find the seasonal variation of tuberculosis in Delhi, India. Methods. R...

The prognostic tendency (PT) correction method is applied in an attempt to reduce systematic errors in coupled GCM seasonal forecasts. The PT method computes the systematic initial tendency error (SITE) of the coupled model and subtracts it from the discrete prognostic equations. In this study, the PT correction is applied only to the three-dimensional ocean temperature. The SITE is computed by...

Introduction Today, Internet, especially Wikipedia, is an important part of everyday life. People can notably use this popular free online encyclopedia to search health-related information. Recent studies showed that Wikipedia data can be used to monitor and to forecast influenza-like illnesses in near real time in the United States [1,2]. We carried out a study to explore whether French Wikipe...