Application of apriori association rules to risk prediction of hepatitis A

Objective To detect potential factors which may cause the outbreaks of hepatitis A and estimate their risk and tendency.Methods The meteorological data and hepatitis A surveillance data were collected.Database for mining were constructed by mapping from source data to spreadsheet format file,and then the method of apriori algorithm was applied to find all the strong association rules by setting support as 0.1 and confidence as 0.8.Results These obtained associations revealed the relation between risk of infectious disease and influencing factors such as season,air pressure,temperature,precipitation and amount of evaporation.Conclusion The association rules method is proved to be helpful in decision-making for infectious disease prediction and control.