0000000000322208
AUTHOR
Andrew B. Lawson
Discussion of "modern statistics of spatial point processes"
The paper ‘Modern statistics for spatial point processes' by Jesper Møller and Rasmus P. Waagepetersen is based on a special invited lecture given by the authors at the 21st Nordic Conference on Mathematical Statistics, held at Rebild, Denmark, in June 2006. At the conference, Antti Penttinen and Eva B. Vedel Jensen were invited to discuss the paper. We here present the comments from the two invited discussants and from a number of other scholars, as well as the authors' responses to these comments. Below Figure 1, Figure 2, etc., refer to figures in the paper under discussion, while Figure A, Figure B, etc., refer to figures in the current discussion. All numbered sections and formulas ref…
Conditional predictive inference for online surveillance of spatial disease incidence
This paper deals with the development of statistical methodology for timely detection of incident disease clusters in space and time. The increasing availability of data on both the time and the location of events enables the construction of multivariate surveillance techniques, which may enhance the ability to detect localized clusters of disease relative to the surveillance of the overall count of disease cases across the entire study region. We introduce the surveillance conditional predictive ordinate as a general Bayesian model-based surveillance technique that allows us to detect small areas of increased disease incidence when spatial data are available. To address the problem of mult…
Application of a Bayesian Spatiotemporal Surveillance Method to NYC Syndromic Data
Incorporating prior knowledge (e.g., the spatial distribution of zip codes and background population effects) into a model using Bayesian methods could potentially improve outbreak detection. We adapted a previously described Bayesian model-based spatiotemporal surveillance technique to daily respiratory syndrome counts in NYC Emergency Department data in 2009, the year of the H1N1 influenza pandemic. Citywide, 56 alarms were produced across 15 zip codes, all during days of elevated respiratory visits. Future work includes evaluating our choice of baseline length, considering other alarm thresholds, and conducting a formal evaluation of the method across five syndromes in NYC.
Integration of animal health and public health surveillance sources to exhaustively inform the risk of zoonosis: An application to visceral leishmaniasis data in Brazil.
Abstract Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a parasitic disease that is endemic in more than 80 countries, and leads to high fatality rates when left untreated. We investigate the relationship of VL cases in dogs and human cases, specifically for evidence of VL in dogs leading to excess cases in humans. We use surveillance data for dogs and humans for the years 2007–2011 to conduct both spatial and spatio-temporal analyses. Several models are evaluated incorporating varying levels of dependency between dog and human data. Models including dog data show marginal improvement over models without; however, for a subset of spatial units with ample data, models provide concordant risk classification …
Integration of animal health and public health surveillance sources to exhaustively inform the risk of zoonosis: An application to echinococcosis in Rio Negro, Argentina
The analysis of zoonotic disease risk requires the consideration of both human and animal geo-referenced disease incidence data. Here we show an application of joint Bayesian analyses to the study of echinococcosis granulosus (EG) in the province of Rio Negro, Argentina. We focus on merging passive and active surveillance data sources of animal and human EG cases using joint Bayesian spatial and spatio-temporal models. While similar spatial clustering and temporal trending was apparent, there appears to be limited lagged dependence between animal and human outcomes. Beyond the data quality issues relating to missingness at different times, we were able to identify relations between dog and …
Gaussian component mixtures and CAR models in Bayesian disease mapping
Hierarchical Bayesian models involving conditional autoregression (CAR) components are commonly used in disease mapping. An alternative model to the proper or improper CAR is the Gaussian component mixture (GCM) model. A review of CAR and GCM models is provided in univariate settings where only one disease is considered, and also in multivariate situations where in addition to the spatial dependence between regions, the dependence among multiple diseases is analyzed. A performance comparison between models using a set of simulated data to help illustrate their respective properties is reported. The results show that both in univariate and multivariate settings, both models perform in a comp…
Prospective analysis of infectious disease surveillance data using syndromic information.
In this paper, we describe a Bayesian hierarchical Poisson model for the prospective analysis of data for infectious diseases. The proposed model consists of two components. The first component describes the behavior of disease during nonepidemic periods and the second component represents the increase in disease counts due to the presence of an epidemic. A novelty of our model formulation is that the parameters describing the spread of epidemics are allowed to vary in both space and time. We also show how syndromic information can be incorporated into the model to provide a better description of the data and more accurate one-step-ahead forecasts. These real-time forecasts can be used to …