Mapping the spatial distribution of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus

Mosquito-borne infectious diseases, such as Rift Valley fever, Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika, have caused mass human death with the transnational expansion fueled by economic globalization. Simulating the distribution of the disease vectors is of great importance in formulating public health planning and disease control strategies. In the present study, we simulated the global distribution of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus at a 5 x 5 km spatial resolution with high-dimensional multidisciplinary datasets and machine learning methods Three relatively popular and robust machine learning models, including support vector machine (SVM), gradient boosting machine (GBM) and random forest (RF), were used. During the fine-tuning process based on training datasets of A. aegypti and A. albopictus, RF models achieved the highest performance with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.973 and 0.974, respectively, followed by GBM (AUC of 0.971 and 0.972, respectively) and SVM (AUC of 0.963 and 0.964, respectively) models. The simulation difference between RF and GBM models was not statistically significant (p > 0.05) based on the validation datasets, whereas statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) were observed for RF and GBM simulations compared with SVM simulations. From the simulated maps derived from RF models, we observed that the distribution of A. albopictus was wider than that of A. aegypti along a latitudinal gradient. The discriminatory power of each factor in simulating the global distribution of the two species was also analyzed. Our results provided fundamental information for further study on disease transmission simulation and risk assessment.