Dengue is hyper-endemic in Singapore and Malaysia, and daily movement rates between the two countries are consistently high, allowing inference on the role of local transmission and imported dengue cases. This paper describes a custom built sparse space–time autoregressive (SSTAR) model to infer and forecast contemporaneous and future dengue transmission patterns in Singapore and 16 administrative regions within Malaysia, taking into account connectivity and geographical adjacency between regions as well as climatic factors. A modification to forecast impulse responses is developed for the case of the SSTAR and is used to simulate changes in dengue transmission in neighbouring regions following a disturbance. The results indicate that there are long-term responses of the neighbouring regions to shocks in a region. By computation of variable inclusion probabilities, we found that each region’s own past counts were important to describe contemporaneous case counts. In 15 out of 16 regions, other regions case counts were important to describe contemporaneous case counts even after controlling for past local dengue transmissions and exogenous factors. Leave-one-region-out analysis using SSTAR showed that dengue transmission counts could be reconstructed for 13 of 16 regions' counts using external dengue transmissions compared to a climate only approach. Lastly, one to four week ahead forecasts from the SSTAR were more accurate than baseline univariate autoregressions.

中文翻译：

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人口连通性的明确表征揭示了区域间登革热冲击的长期持续性

登革热在新加坡和马来西亚高度流行，两国之间的日常流动率一直很高，因此可以推断本地传播和输入性登革热病例的作用。本文描述了一个定制的稀疏时空自回归 (SSTAR) 模型，用于推断和预测新加坡和马来西亚 16 个行政区的同期和未来登革热传播模式，同时考虑到区域之间的连通性和地理相邻性以及气候因素。针对 SSTAR 的情况开发了对预测脉冲响应的修改，用于模拟干扰后邻近地区登革热传播的变化。结果表明，邻近地区对一个地区的冲击存在长期反应。通过计算变量包含概率，我们发现每个地区自己过去的计数对于描述同期病例计数很重要。在 16 个地区中的 15 个地区中，即使在控制了过去的本地登革热传播和外源性因素之后，其他地区的病例数对于描述同期病例数也很重要。使用 SSTAR 的留一区域分析表明，与仅使用气候方法相比，使用外部登革热传播可以重建 16 个区域中的 13 个区域的登革热传播计数。最后，来自 SSTAR 的一到四个星期的预测比基线单变量自回归更准确。其他地区的病例数对于描述同期病例数很重要，即使在控制了过去的本地登革热传播和外源因素之后也是如此。使用 SSTAR 的留一区域分析表明，与仅使用气候方法相比，使用外部登革热传播可以重建 16 个区域中的 13 个区域的登革热传播计数。最后，来自 SSTAR 的一到四个星期的预测比基线单变量自回归更准确。其他地区的病例数对于描述同期病例数很重要，即使在控制了过去的本地登革热传播和外源因素之后也是如此。使用 SSTAR 的留一区域分析表明，与仅使用气候方法相比，使用外部登革热传播可以重建 16 个区域中的 13 个区域的登革热传播计数。最后，来自 SSTAR 的一到四个星期的预测比基线单变量自回归更准确。