A literature review of recurrent neural network approaches to malaria outbreak prediction in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Malaria remains a significant public health issue in Sub-Saharan Africa. Predictive modelling is increasingly viewed as a way to move from counting cases reactively to preparing proactively for outbreaks. This literature review examines peer-reviewed research published from 1997 to 2025. It covers recurrent neural networks (RNNs) methods, attention mechanisms, multi-source data integration, and health-system informatics relevant to malaria prediction in low- and middle-income countries. A thorough search through Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, PubMed, and SpringerLink identified 187 candidate papers. After reviewing titles and abstracts, 42 papers met the inclusion criteria. The review organizes the selected studies into six main categories: climate-disease ecology, statistical forecasting, machine learning (ML) baselines, RNNs, attention mechanisms, and health-system data integration. A comparative matrix highlights the similarities and differences in methods across twenty representative studies. The review points out four persistent gaps: the lack of attention-augmented RNNs for malaria forecasting in Southern Africa, limited integration of health-facility infrastructure features with climate predictors, inadequate handling of missing data in African satellite-derived climate series, and the absence of operational dashboards that make model outputs usable for district health officers without statistical training. Future research should focus on cross-country transferability studies, using graph neural networks to capture spatial spillover, and real-time integration with national surveillance systems like district health information software 2 (DHIS2).