Background and aims: Since accurate forecasts help inform decisions for preventive health-careintervention and epidemic control, this goal can only be achieved by making use of appropriatetechniques and methodologies. As much as forecast precision is important, methods and modelselection procedures are critical to forecast precision. This study aimed at providing an overview o...

S ince 2000, almost half a million Americans have died from drug overdoses. This modern plague— largely driven by opioid addiction—degrades health, saps productivity, spawns crime, and devastates families, all at enormous societal cost. How did we get here, and what do we do now? About 20 years ago, compassionate advocacy for better treatment of chronic pain, combined with aggressive marketing ...

BACKGROUND Real-time forecasting of epidemics, especially those based on a likelihood-based approach, is understudied. This study aimed to develop a simple method that can be used for the real-time epidemic forecasting. METHODS A discrete time stochastic model, accounting for demographic stochasticity and conditional measurement, was developed and applied as a case study to the weekly inciden...

Mathematical models have the potential to be useful to forecast the course of epidemics. In this chapter, a family of logistic patch models are preliminarily evaluated for use in disease modeling and forecasting. Here we also derive the logistic equation in an infectious disease transmission context based on population behavior and used it for forecasting the trajectories of the 2013-2015 Ebola...

Introduction In order to transition the forecasting, estimation and management of epidemic risks to individual administrative areas, the Agency for Consumer Rights Protection of Kazakhstan has developed a concept for modernizing the existing national system of the epidemiological surveillance (SES). It is proposed that the data from the SES (epidemiology, sanitary and epidemiological background...

BACKGROUND Over the past few decades, numerous forecasting methods have been proposed in the field of epidemic forecasting. Such methods can be classified into different categories such as deterministic vs. probabilistic, comparative methods vs. generative methods, and so on. In some of the more popular comparative methods, researchers compare observed epidemiological data from the early stages...

From the security point of view malware evolution forecasting is very important, since it provides an opportunity to predict malware epidemic outbreaks, develop effective countermeasure techniques and evaluate information security level. Genetic algorithm approach for mobile malware evolution forecasting already proved its effectiveness. There exists a number of simulation tools based on the Ge...

Reliable forecasts of influenza can aid in the control of both seasonal and pandemic outbreaks. We introduce a simulation optimization (SIMOP) approach for forecasting the influenza epidemic curve. This study represents the final step of a project aimed at using a combination of simulation, classification, statistical and optimization techniques to forecast the epidemic curve and infer underlyi...