Forecasting the Incidence of Breast, Colorectal and Bladder Cancers in North of Iran Using Time Series Models; Comparing Bayesian, ARIMA and Bootstrap Approaches

Introduction: Cancers are the second cause of death worldwide. Prevalence and incidence of cancers is getting increased by aging and population growth. This study aims to predict the incidence of breast, colorectal and bladder cancers in north of Iran until 2020 using time series models. Methods: The number of breast, colorectal and bladder cancer cases from April 2014 to March 2016 was extracted. The time variable was each month of the study years and using the number of daily registered cancers in each month, the time series of the monthly incident cases was designed. Then, three methods of time series analysis including Box Jenkins, Bayesian and Bootstrap were applied for predicting the incidence of the above cancers until March 2020. Results: The number of bladder cancer cases in March 2014 was 6 cases. This study showed that the number of breast cancer cases in March 2020 will be increased to 15, 15 and 26 cases based on ARIMA, Bootstrap and Bayesian methods respectively. In addition, the incident cases of breast cancer, will be increased from 32 in 2014 to 65 (ARIMA method), 47 (Bootstrap method) and 364 (Bayesian method). The corresponding figure for colorectal cancer was 30, 30 and 95 respectively. Conclusion: The increasing trend of breast, bladder and colorectal cancers will be continued which is considerable based on the Bayesian method results. Considering the limited reliable data used in a short time, it seems that the forecasting results of this model is acceptable.