Predicting the emergence of human hantavirus disease using a combination of viral dynamics and rodent demographic patterns.

F Sauvage — 2008-03-18T11:44:46-00:00

Epidemiol Infect, Vol. 135, No. 1. (January 2007), pp. 46-56.

The paper proposes a model explaining the spatial variation in incidence of nephropathia epidemica in Europe. We take into account the rodent dynamic features and the replicative dynamics of the virus in animals, high in the acute phase of newly infected animals and low in the subsequent chronic phase. The model revealed that only vole populations with multi-annual fluctuations allow for simultaneously high numbers of infected rodents and high proportions of those rodents in the acute excretion phase during the culminating phase of population build-up. This leads to a brief peak in exceptionally high concentrations of virus in the environment, and thereby, to human exposure. Such a mechanism suggests that a slight ecological disturbance in animal-parasite systems could result in the emergence of human diseases. Thus, the potential risk for public health due to several zoonotic diseases may be greater than previously believed, based solely on the distribution of human cases.

Pattern Discovery and Detection: A Unified Statistical Methodology

David Hand — 2007-09-17T20:21:31-00:00

Journal of Applied Statistics, Vol. 31, No. 8. (2004), pp. 885-924.

Modern statistical data analysis is predominantly model-driven, seeking to decompose an observed data distribution in terms of major underlying descriptive features modified by some stochastic variation. A large part of data mining is also concerned with this exercise. However, another fundamental part of data mining is concerned with detecting anomalies amongst the vast mass of the data: the small deviations, unusual observations, unexpected clusters of observations, or surprising blips in the data, which the model does not explain. We call such anomalies patterns. For sound reasons, which are outlined in the paper, the data mining community has tended to focus on the algorithmic aspects of pattern discovery, and has not developed any general underlying theoretical base. However, such a base is important for any technology: it helps to steer the direction in which the technology develops, as well as serving to provide a basis from which algorithms can be compared, and to indicate which problems are the important ones waiting to be solved. This paper attempts to provide such a theoretical base, linking the ideas to statistical work in spatial epidemiology, scan statistics, outlier detection, and other areas. One of the striking characteristics of work on pattern discovery is that the ideas have been developed in several theoretical arenas, and also in several application domains, with little apparent awareness of the fundamentally common nature of the problem. Like model building, pattern discovery is fundamentally an inferential activity, and is an area in which statisticians can make very significant contributions.

CiteULike: neteler's pattern

Predicting the emergence of human hantavirus disease using a combination of viral dynamics and rodent demographic patterns.

Pattern Discovery and Detection: A Unified Statistical Methodology