PONE-D-21-09535

Predicting Malaria Epidemics in Burkina Faso with Machine Learning

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Harvey,

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Thippa Reddy Gadekallu

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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1. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript:

The authors thank Seydou Toguiyeni, Aziza Merzouki, Maroussia Roelens, Iveth Gonzalez, Antoine Geissbuhler (University

of Geneva), Beatriz Galatas (WHO), the IeDA team of Terre des hommes in Burkina Faso and the Ministry of Health from Burkina

Faso for their input and discussions. This work was in part funded by Cloudera Foundation, the Marguerite Foundation and the

Delta ITP institute, and technically supported by Cloudera Foundation and Tableau Foundation.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have presented a a combined early warning system and malaria predictor that can predict the 13 week trajectory of malaria cases in an primary health facility in Burkina Faso. This paper is suitable for publication but it needs minor revision.

Below are my comments:

• The contributions of the authors are not clear. They have mentioned in first contribution.

• Several paragraphs contain trivial information and should be dropped.

• Each section should have a summary table. If contents are too much, then add summary tables for the subsection.

• Each section should present new information and perspective to enlighten the readers.

• Paper contributions are presented without pitching problems in recent studies. Add one paragraph before it to highlight issues in recent studies and at the end how this paper overcome those shortcomings.

• Improve the presentation and resolution of Fig. 3,4,5,6. It’s a very informative figure.

• writing is good, need to check the typo errors.

• Paper is well-formatted, plz check the formatting of the reference

• I found some English mistakes please check them.

• There is lot of relevant literature missing. Please cite the below articles but not limited to:

a) Bojja, Giridhar Reddy, Martinson Ofori, Jun Liu, and Loknath Sai Ambati. "Early public outlook on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19): A social media study." (2020).

b)Reddy, G. Thippa, M. Praveen Kumar Reddy, Kuruva Lakshmanna, Dharmendra Singh Rajput, Rajesh Kaluri, and Gautam Srivastava. "Hybrid genetic algorithm and a fuzzy logic classifier for heart disease diagnosis." Evolutionary Intelligence 13, no. 2 (2020): 185-196.

c) Rehman, Zaka Ur, M. Sultan Zia, Giridhar Reddy Bojja, Muhammad Yaqub, Feng Jinchao, and Kaleem Arshid. "Texture based localization of a brain tumor from MR-images by using a machine learning approach." Medical hypotheses 141 (2020): 109705.

d) Bojja, Reddy, and Omar El-Gayar. "Predicting Hospital Readmissions of Diabetic patients-A Machine Learning Approach." (2019).

Reviewer #2: 1. The authors have to proofread the article carefully. There are many grammatical errors in the paper.

2. There are several long sentences in the paper. Try to use simple and short sentences.

3. The abstract has to be rephrased.

4. WHat are the limitations of the existing works that motivated the current research?

5. List out the main contributions of the current work.

6. The related work can be summarized as a table.

7. Some of the recent and relevant works on disease prediction and machine learning such as the following can be discussed in the paper: "Variance ranking attributes selection techniques for binary classification problem in imbalance data, An adaptive multi-layer botnet detection technique using machine learning classifiers, Early detection of diabetic retinopathy using PCA-firefly based deep learning model".

8. Compare the current work with recent state-of-the-art.

9. Discuss about the limitations of the current work in conclusion.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Predicting Malaria Epidemics in Burkina Faso with Machine Learning

PONE-D-21-09535R1

Dear Dr. Harvey,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Thippa Reddy Gadekallu

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Authors have done a great job in addressed the points raised by the reviewers. Now the manuscript looks more precise and sound.

Reviewer #2: The authors have addressed all the suggestions and comments I recommend accepting the paper in its present form.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No