Unraveling the impact of human mobility on dengue outbreaks in Peninsular Malaysia: a Granger causality approach.

Dengue is a vector-borne disease transmitted by mosquito of the Aedes genus. This disease has caused financial burdens on public health systems with considerable morbidity and mortality. It became endemic in Southeast Asia and many countries worldwide. This article aims to study the impact of human mobility with outbreak cases in Peninsular Malaysia on dengue virus spread and to test whether human mobility could share detailed behavior in predicting dengue virus transmission between states. We present a model to analyze the relationship between states using the correlation and Granger causality methods, the first using cross-correlation and partial cross-correlation methods for every two states. We then show causal inferences regarding the dengue outbreak in the area using Granger Causality and Conditional Granger Causality. Each method was used to make retrospective forecasts of historical dengue outbreaks from 2010 to 2014. We found that Selangor and Pahang are the largest sources of infection for other states. We also found that rainfall information has an insignificant linear effect on dengue cases in Peninsular Malaysia.