Tactical vs. strategic: An adaptable framework for horizon-dependent dengue forecasting using data-driven approaches with serotype and climate covariates in Bangladesh

Abstract

Dengue remains a major public health problem in endemic regions, including Bangladesh. Forecasting algorithms relying on climatic variables may not capture epidemiological information such as dengue serotype patterns. This study proposes a horizon-dependent dengue forecasting framework and applies it to Bangladesh. This pipeline included temporal, meteorological, demographic, and epidemiological covariates in a district-panel pipeline and compares classical, machine-learning, and deep-learning algorithms using aggregate, horizon-wise, regime-wise, outbreak-detection, and uncertainty metrics. Coefficient-based interpretation, SHAP, permutation importance, and nonlinear causal-dependence analysis were used to examine predictor impacts across horizons. SARIMAX was used as the baseline model. TFT produced quantile forecasts but showed poor interval calibration during outbreak periods. Results show that no single model performed best across all forecasting horizons: SARIMAX ranked highest for one-step outbreak alerting (precision = 0.886, recall = 0.824, F1 score = 0.854, and ROC-AUC = 0.950), whereas Prophet performed best for pooled magnitude forecasting at horizons 2–6. MLR showed competitive performance in regime-wise evaluation. These findings show that dengue forecasting algorithms should be selected according to the intended decision objective and evaluated using task-relevant protocols.