Prediction of monthly reported cases of hand foot and mouth disease by ARIMA model in China

Objective To establish an autoregressive integrated moving average(ARIMA)model for the prediction of hand foot and mouth disease(HFMD)incidence in China and evaluate its forecosting ability. Methods The ARIMA model was established by using the incidence data of HFMD in China from March 2010 to January 2017 with software Excel 2007 and the incidence data of HFMD from February to July 2017 was used to evaluate the prediction abiliy of the model. Results The incidence of HFMD had obvious periodicity in China,i.e. 24 months. The ARIMA(1, 0, 1)(0, 1, 1)24 model was established to predict the incidence of HFMD in China. Compared with actual data from February to July 2017,the mean of absolute error and the relative error were 22 505.47 and 15.71%,respectively. Conclusion Based on the results of this study,the ARIMA(1, 0, 1)(0, 1, 1)24 model can be used for the fitting of HFMD incidence in China. It can not only predict the case number but also provide reference for the development of evaluation of prevention and control measures.