Machine learning to help predict future dengue fever outbreaks

With 390 million dengue virus infections a year, researchers need all the help they can get in tracking infections. Recently, machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, has been used to make predictions about where the next outbreak will occur.

Dengue outbreaks used to happen about every five years. Now in Indonesia, as in other parts of the world, they happen more frequently. The number of dengue cases actually reported to the WHO increased more than ten times over the last two decades, from 505,430 cases in 2000, to 5.2 million in 2019. Some 4,032 people, mostly children, died of dengue in 2019.