Evaluating the effectiveness of self-attention mechanism in tuberculosis time series forecasting

Abstract

Background: With the increasing impact of tuberculosis on public health, accurately predicting future tuberculosis cases is crucial for optimizing of health resources and medical service allocation. This study applies a self-attention mechanism to predict the number of tuberculosis cases, aiming to evaluate its effectiveness in forecasting. Methods: Monthly tuberculosis case data from Changde City between 2010 and 2021 were used to construct a self-attention model, a long short-term memory (LSTM) model, and an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model. The performance of these models was evaluated using three metrics: root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Results: The self-attention model outperformed the other models in terms of prediction accuracy. On the test set, the RMSE of the self-attention model was approximately 7.41% lower than that of the LSTM model, MAE was reduced by about 10.99%, and MAPE was reduced by approximately 9.87%. Compared to the ARIMA model, RMSE was reduced by about 28.86%, MAE by about 32.22%, and MAPE by approximately 29.89%. Conclusion: The self-attention model can effectively improve the prediction accuracy of tuberculosis cases, providing guidance for health departments optimizing of health resources and medical service allocation.