Modelling Epidemiological Data Using Box-Jenkins Procedure

In this paper, the Box-Jenkins modelling procedure is used to determine an ARIMA model and go further to forecasting. We consider data of Malaria cases from Ministry of Health (Kabwe District)-Zambia for the period, 2009 to 2013 for age 1 to under 5 years. The model-building process involves three steps: tentative identification of a model from the ARIMA class, estimation of parameters in the identified model, and diagnostic checks. Results show that an appropriate model is simply an ARIMA (1, 0, 0) due to the fact that, the ACF has an exponential decay and the PACF has a spike at lag 1 which is an indication of the said model. The forecasted Malaria cases for January and February, 2014 are 220 and 265, respectively.