A Threshold Criteria for Seasonal Amplification and Outbreaks of Mosquito-Borne Disease (MBD) Cases in Kerala using Climate Parameters

Abstract

Modelling the dynamics of mosquito borne disease (MBD) cases is a challenging task. The current study first proposes a generic dynamical model to qualitatively understand the seasonality as well as outbreaks of malaria and dengue over the state of Kerala based on a climate forced oscillator model, which is then supplemented by a data driven model for quantitative evaluation. The proposed forced oscillator model is parametric and general in nature which can be qualitatively used to understand the seasonality and outbreaks. However, since parametric model-based estimation require estimation of multiple parameters and several closure assumptions, we used the K-means clustering which is a data driven clustering approach to understand the relationship between Malaria and Dengue cases and climate forcing. The results showed a clear relationship of the MBD cases with the first order and second order moments (i.e. mean and standard deviation) of the climate forcing parameters. Based on this, we came up with an objective threshold criterion which relates the climate parameters to the number of cases of malaria and dengue cases over Kerala.