Evaluating and implementing temporal, spatial, and spatio-temporal methods for outbreak detection in a local syndromic surveillance system

Robert W Mathes, Ramona Lall, Alison Levin-Rector, Jessica Sell, Marc Paladini, Kevin J Konty, Don Olson and Don Weiss

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 9, 1-19

Abstract: The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has operated an emergency department syndromic surveillance system since 2001, using temporal and spatial scan statistics run on a daily basis for cluster detection. Since the system was originally implemented, a number of new methods have been proposed for use in cluster detection. We evaluated six temporal and four spatial/spatio-temporal detection methods using syndromic surveillance data spiked with simulated injections. The algorithms were compared on several metrics, including sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, coherence, and timeliness. We also evaluated each method’s implementation, programming time, run time, and the ease of use. Among the temporal methods, at a set specificity of 95%, a Holt-Winters exponential smoother performed the best, detecting 19% of the simulated injects across all shapes and sizes, followed by an autoregressive moving average model (16%), a generalized linear model (15%), a modified version of the Early Aberration Reporting System’s C2 algorithm (13%), a temporal scan statistic (11%), and a cumulative sum control chart (

Date: 2017
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0184419

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184419

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