ArticleOriginal scientific text

Title

Addressing the problem of lack of representativeness on syndromic surveillance schemes

Authors 1, 2

Affiliations

  1. CEAUL; Departamento de Matemática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal
  2. CEAUL; Departamento de Estatística e Investigação Operacional, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal>

Abstract

A major concern with some contagious diseases has recently led to an enormous effort to monitor population health status by several different means. This work presents a modeling approach to overcome this poor data characteristic, allowing its use for the estimation of the true population disease picture. We use a state space model, where we run two processes in parallel - a process describing the non observable states of the population concerning the presence/absence of disease, and an observational process resulting from the monitoring. We then use resampling importance sampling estimation techniques, in a Bayesian framework, which enables us to estimate the population states and, thus, the corresponding disease incidence curves.

Keywords

syndromic surveillance, state space models, importance sampling

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Pages:
169-183
Main language of publication
English
Received
2009-10-05
Published
2009
Exact and natural sciences