An improved algorithm for outbreak detection in multiple surveillance systems

In England and Wales, a large‐scale multiple statistical surveillance system for infectious disease outbreaks has been in operation for nearly two decades. This system uses a robust quasi‐Poisson regression algorithm to identify aberrances in weekly counts of isolates reported to the Health Protecti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Statistics in medicine Vol. 32; no. 7; pp. 1206 - 1222
Main Authors: Noufaily, Angela, Enki, Doyo G., Farrington, Paddy, Garthwaite, Paul, Andrews, Nick, Charlett, André
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 30.03.2013
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Subjects:
Algorithms
Biostatistics
Disease Outbreaks - statistics & numerical data
England
Epidemics
False Positive Reactions
Humans
Medical treatment
Models, Statistical
negative binomial regression
outbreak
outlier
Performance evaluation
Poisson Distribution
Probability
Public Health Surveillance - methods
quasi-Poisson regression
Regression Analysis
robustness
Simulation
statistical surveillance
Surveillance
Wales
England
Wales
ISSN:0277-6715, 1097-0258, 1097-0258
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In England and Wales, a large‐scale multiple statistical surveillance system for infectious disease outbreaks has been in operation for nearly two decades. This system uses a robust quasi‐Poisson regression algorithm to identify aberrances in weekly counts of isolates reported to the Health Protection Agency. In this paper, we review the performance of the system with a view to reducing the number of false reports, while retaining good power to detect genuine outbreaks. We undertook extensive simulations to evaluate the existing system in a range of contrasting scenarios. We suggest several improvements relating to the treatment of trends, seasonality, re‐weighting of baselines and error structure. We validate these results by running the existing and proposed new systems in parallel on real data. We find that the new system greatly reduces the number of alarms while maintaining good overall performance and in some instances increasing the sensitivity. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliography:Supporting information may be found in the online version of this article.
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ArticleID:SIM5595
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ISSN:0277-6715
1097-0258
1097-0258
DOI:10.1002/sim.5595