Mining Citywide Dengue Spread Patterns in Singapore Through Hotspot Dynamics from Open Web Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel framework that models and predicts dengue hotspot spread in Singapore by uncovering latent transmission links from open web data, aligning with human mobility patterns, and enabling proactive public health responses.

Contribution

It introduces a new method for mining hidden epidemic transmission networks from publicly available data, improving prediction and understanding of dengue spread in urban areas.

Findings

Achieved an average F-score of 0.79 with four weeks of hotspot history.

Learned transmission networks closely match commuting flows.

Validated the stability of spreading patterns across weeks.

Abstract

Dengue, a mosquito-borne disease, continues to pose a persistent public health challenge in urban areas, particularly in tropical regions such as Singapore. Effective and affordable control requires anticipating where transmission risks are likely to emerge so that interventions can be deployed proactively rather than reactively. This study introduces a novel framework that uncovers and exploits latent transmission links between urban regions, mined directly from publicly available dengue case data. Instead of treating cases as isolated reports, we model how hotspot formation in one area is influenced by epidemic dynamics in neighboring regions. While mosquito movement is highly localized, long-distance transmission is often driven by human mobility, and in our case study, the learned network aligns closely with commuting flows, providing an interpretable explanation for citywide spread. These hidden links are optimized through gradient descent and used not only to forecast hotspot status but also to verify the consistency of spreading patterns, by examining the stability of the inferred network across consecutive weeks. Case studies on Singapore during 2013-2018 and 2020 show that four weeks of hotspot history are sufficient to achieve an average F-score of 0.79. Importantly, the learned transmission links align with commuting flows, highlighting the interpretable interplay between hidden epidemic spread and human mobility. By shifting from simply reporting dengue cases to mining and validating hidden spreading dynamics, this work transforms open web-based case data into a predictive and explanatory resource. The proposed framework advances epidemic modeling while providing a scalable, low-cost tool for public health planning, early intervention, and urban resilience.