Identifying Climatological Interactions in Global Influenza Across Temperate and Tropical Regions

Recently, global epidemic models that uses climatological factors have been shown to explain influenza activities for both temperate and tropical regions. In this paper, we extend these global models by including interactions of climatological factors. We find that countries in Europe and Australia have higher forecast skill, indicating the stronger relationship of influenza with climatological factors, than regions in other continents. The influenza activities of 47 (83%) countries can be explained with a closer match using multi-factor interactions along with original factors than only using the original factors.