Can we predict flu deaths with Machine Learning and R?

Among the many R packages, there is the outbreaks package. It contains datasets on epidemics, on of which is from the 2013 outbreak of influenza A H7N9 in China, as analysed by Kucharski et al. (2014): I will be using their data as an example to test whether we can use Machine Learning algorithms for predicting disease outcome. Disclaimer: I am not an expert in Machine Learning. Everything I know, I taught myself. So, if you identify any mistakes or have tips and tricks for improvement, please don't hesitate to let me know!