Comparison study of SARIMA and ARGO models for in influenza epidemics prediction

The big data analysis has received much attention from the researchers working in various fields because the big data has a great potential in detecting or predicting future events such as epidemic outbreaks and changes in stock prices. Reflecting the current popularity of big data analysis, many authors have proposed methods tracking influenza epidemics based on internet-based information. The recently proposed 'autoregressive model using Google (ARGO) model' (Yang et al., 2015) is one of those influenza tracking models that harness search queries from Google as well as the reports from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and appears to outperform the existing method such as 'Google Flu Trends (GFT)'. Although the ARGO predicts well the outbreaks of influenza, this study demonstrates that a classical seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model can outperform the ARGO. The SARIMA model incorporates more accurate seasonality of the past influenza activities and takes less input variables into account. Our findings show that the SARIMA model is a functional tool for monitoring influenza epidemics.