AIM: To study the application of artificial neural network (ANN) in forecasting the incidence of hepatitis A, which had an autoregression phenomenon.METHODS: The data of the incidence of hepatitis A in Liaoning Province from 1981 to 2001 were obtained from Liaoning Disease Control and Prevention Center. We used the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)model of time series analysis to determine whether there was any autoregression phenomenon in the data. Then the data of the incidence were switched into [0,1] intervals as the network theoretical output. The data from 1981 to 1997 were used as the training and verifying sets and the data from 1998 to 2001 were made up into the test set.STATISTICA neural network (ST NN) was used to construct,train and simulate the artificial neural network.RESULTS: Twenty-four networks were tested and seven were retained. The best network we found had excellent performance, its regression ratio was 0.73, and its correlatior, was 0.69. There were 2 input variables in the network, one was AR(1), and the other was time. The number of units in hidden layer was 3. In ARIMA time series analysis results, the best model was first order autoregression without difference and smoothness. The total sum square error of the ANN model was 9 090.21, the sum square error of the training set and testing set was 8 377.52 and 712.69,respectively, they were all less than that of ARIMA model.The corresponding value of ARIMA was 12 291.79, 8 944.95and 3 346.84, respectively. The correlation coefficient of nonlinear regression (RNL) of ANN was 0.71, while the RNL of ARIMA linear autoregression model was 0.66.CONCLUSION: ANN is superior to conventional methods in forecasting the incidence of hepatitis A which has an autoregression phenomenon.