Revealing Influences of Socioeconomic Factors over Disease Outbreaks

The recent Covid-19 pandemic elucidates the need for a better disease outbreak analysis and surveillance system, which can harness state-of-the-art data mining and machine learning techniques to produce better forecasting. In this regard, understanding the correlation between disease outbreaks and socioeconomic factors should pave the way for such systems by providing useful indicators, which are yet to be explored in the literature to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, in this study, we accumulated data on 72 infectious diseases and their outbreaks all over the globe over a period of 23 years as well as corresponding different socioeconomic data. We, then, performed point-biserial and spearman correlation analysis over the collected data. Our analysis of the obtained correlations demonstrates that various disease outbreak attributes are positively and negatively correlated with different socioeconomic indicators. For example, indicators such as lifetime risk of maternal death, adolescent fertility rate, etc., are positively correlated, while indicators such as life expectancy at birth, measles immunization, etc., are negatively correlated, with disease outbreaks that affect the digestive organ system. In this paper, we find and summarize the correlations between 126 outbreak attributes derived from the characteristics of the 72 diseases in consideration and 192 socioeconomic factors which is a novel contribution to the field of disease outbreak analysis and prediction.