%0 Journal Article %A Hermenegilde Nkurunziza and Albrecht Gebhardt and Juergen Pilz %D 2010 %J International Journal of Mathematical and Computational Sciences %B World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology %I Open Science Index 37, 2010 %T Forecasting Malaria Cases in Bujumbura %U https://publications.waset.org/pdf/15033 %V 37 %X The focus in this work is to assess which method allows a better forecasting of malaria cases in Bujumbura ( Burundi) when taking into account association between climatic factors and the disease. For the period 1996-2007, real monthly data on both malaria epidemiology and climate in Bujumbura are described and analyzed. We propose a hierarchical approach to achieve our objective. We first fit a Generalized Additive Model to malaria cases to obtain an accurate predictor, which is then used to predict future observations. Various well-known forecasting methods are compared leading to different results. Based on in-sample mean average percentage error (MAPE), the multiplicative exponential smoothing state space model with multiplicative error and seasonality performed better. %P 14 - 19