Online mapping and forecasting of epidemics using open-source indicators

Technical Report · Thu Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1562406· OSTI ID:1562406

Ray, Jaideep ^[1]; Lefantzi, Sophia ^[1]; Bauer, Joshua ^[1]; Khalil, Mohammad ^[1]; Rothfuss, Andrew J. ^[1]; Cauthen, Katherine Regina ^[2]; Finley, Patrick D. ^[2]; Smith, Halley ^[2]

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1. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-CA), Livermore, CA (United States)
2. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

Open-source indicators have been proposed as a way of tracking and forecasting disease outbreaks. Some, such are meteorological data, are readily available as reanalysis products. Others, such as those derived from our online behavior (web searches, media article etc.) are gathered easily and are more timely than public health reporting. In this study we investigate how these datastreams may be combined to provide useful epidemiological information. The investigation is performed by building data assimilation systems to track influenza in California and dengue in India. The first does not suffer from incomplete data and was chosen to explore disease modeling needs. The second explores the case when observational data is sparse and disease modeling complexities are beside the point. The two test cases are for opposite ends of the disease tracking spectrum. We find that data assimilation systems that produce disease activity maps can be constructed. Further, being able to combine multiple open-source datastreams is a necessity as any one individually is not very informative. The data assimilation systems have very little in common except that they contain disease models, calibration algorithms and some ability to impute missing data. Thus while the data assimilation systems share the goal for accurate forecasting, they are practically designed to compensate for the shortcomings of the datastreams. Thus we expect them to be disease and location-specific.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Lab. (SNL-CA), Livermore, CA (United States); Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1562406
• Report Number(s): SAND-2016-9282; 647547
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English