Neural parameter calibration for dengue outbreak forecasting

Dengue fever poses a growing public health challenge in tropical and subtropical regions, with transmission driven by complex interactions among viral and host. Computational models, often expressed as ordinary differential equations (ODEs), are widely used to understand complex systems such as dengue fever transmission dynamics. However, traditional parameter estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) often require complex setups and are computationally expensive. In this study, we choose a compartmental model extended to human and mosquito populations, estimate its parameters using neural parameter calibration (NPC), and validate the approach using datasets collected from South America and Southeast Asia. The extended compartment model (ECM) is expressed using seven ODEs, describing dengue transmission dynamics between humans and mosquitoes. NPC involves using a neural network to learn the posterior distribution of parameters and initial conditions of the model in consideration. We analyzed six surveillance datasets on cumulative dengue cases, comprising data from three cities (Bello, Iquitos, and San Juan) and three Southeast Asian countries (Vietnam, the Philippines, and Cambodia). NPC achieved significantly faster run times than MCMC: 408 seconds on average versus 2616.01 seconds for city-level analyses and 368 seconds on average versus 2998.83 seconds for country-level analyses. Meanwhile, it delivers comparable accuracy: mean squared error (MSE) 0.00678 versus 0.01638 for the city datasets; and 0.00605 versus 0.01897 for the country datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that combining ECM with NPC enables accurate dengue outbreak forecasts at substantially lower computational cost, offering a practical tool that supports timely response, especially in low-resource environments such as Southeast Asia.