<![CDATA[Abstract. Among all notifiable diseases in Indonesia, Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI) consistently registers the highest national burden of illness. Within South Sulawesi Province alone, the eight-month tally from January through August 2023 surpassed 320,942 confirmed cases, underscoring the critical need for reliable case-number projections to guide evidence-based health-service planning. The present work constructs a time series forecasting framework that integrates ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) with a Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) under the hybrid paradigm proposed by Zhang (2003). Monthly ARI incidence data spanning January 2014 to December 2024 provided 132 observations in total. Following a chronological split, the first 96 data points (January 2014–December 2021) served as the training set and the remaining 36 (January 2022–December 2024) as the hold-out evaluation set. ARIMA captured the linear dynamics of the series, whereas RBFNN was subsequently applied to the ARIMA residuals to account for any nonlinear structure that remained unexplained. Minimum-AIC model selection identified ARIMA(2,1,2) as the most suitable linear specification. For the RBFNN stage, a four-lag input vector—derived from the partial autocorrelation function—combined with four hidden units and a multiquadratic basis function delivered the best generalisation performance. Assessed against MAPE, RMSE, and R², the standalone ARIMA(2,1,2) attained 14.19%, 5038.37, and 0.6275, respectively; RBFNN alone produced 15.47%, 4714.93, and 0.5479; and the Hybrid ARIMA–RBFNN yielded 16.11%, 5014.99, and 0.6309. The superior R² of the combined model demonstrates its enhanced capacity to account for data variability. Because all three models returned MAPE values below the 20% threshold, they qualify as good predictors under the Lewis (1982) classification scheme. On this basis, the hybrid approach is put forward as the preferred tool for ARI early-warning and surveillance operations in South Sulawesi.]]>
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