Downscaling Epidemiological Time Series Data for Improving Forecasting Accuracy: An Algorithmic Approach

Abstract

Data scarcity and discontinuity are common occurrences in the healthcare and epidemiological dataset and often need help in forming an educative decision and forecasting the upcoming scenario. Often, these data are stored as monthly/yearly aggregate where the prevalent forecasting tools like Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA), and TBATS often fail to provide satisfactory results. Artificial data synthesis methods have been proven to be a powerful tool for tackling these challenges. The paper aims to propose a downscaling data algorithm based on the underlying distribution. Our findings show that the synthesized data is in agreement with the original data in terms of trend, seasonality, and residuals, and the synthesized data provides a stable foothold for the forecasting tools to generate a much more accurate forecast of the situation.