Spatial and Temporal Analyses of the Spread of Zika Virus Worldwide

Abstract

Zika fever is a disease caused by a mosquitoborne virus. In most cases, Zika virus is spread by two species of Aedes mosquito: Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus. The first isolation of Zika virus was in Uganda in 1947. Due to the lack of researchers in the past, it was difficult for the scientific community to understand the seriousness of this disease and the ways to reduce its spread. In mid–2015, Zika virus had spread over the Pacific and the Americas. In this research study, we present a spatial and temporal analysis of the spread of Zika virus (ZIKAV) around the world with focus on Saudi Arabia. In our proposed approach, in order to locate the spread of ZIKAV on the world map for spatial analysis we use scatter plots, Moran scatter plots and k-mean clustering. Further, we classify the clustered data using support-vector-machine (SVM) classification. The classification results show high precision and recall scores.