Forecasting Influenza Trends Using Decomposition Technique and LightGBM Optimized by Grey Wolf Optimizer Algorithm

Influenza is an acute respiratory infectious disease marked by its high contagiousness and rapid spread, caused by influenza viruses. Accurate influenza prediction is a critical issue in public health and serves as an essential tool for epidemiological studies. This paper seeks to improve the prediction accuracy of influenza-like illness (ILI) proportions by proposing a novel predictive model that integrates a data decomposition technique with the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) algorithm, aiming to overcome the limitations of current prediction methods. Firstly, the most suitable indicators were selected using Spearman correlation coefficient. Secondly, a GWO-LightGBM model was established to obtain the residuals between the predicted and actual values. The residual sequence from the GWO-LightGBM model was then decomposed and corrected using the Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (CEEMDAN) method, which led to the development of the GWO-LightGBM-CEEMDAN model. The incorporation of the Baidu Index was shown to enhance the precision of the proposed model’s predictions. The proposed model outperforms comparison models in terms of evaluation metrics such as RMSE and MAPE. Additionally, our study found that the revised Baidu Index indicators show a notable association with ILI trends.