Evaluating the Performance of Syndromic Surveillance System using High-fidelity Outbreak Simulations

The evaluation of outbreak detection performance remained a major challenge to every syndromic surveillance system. Owing to the scarcity and uncertainty of infectious disease outbreaks in the real world, simulated outbreak datasets have been commonly used by scholars for performance evaluation. Although this method was powerful in estimating the performance of syndromic surveillance across a variety of outbreak scenarios, the inevitable differences between simulation and authentic outbreak event limited its external validity.

Objective

Our study aimed to conduct high-fidelity simulations based on real-world outbreaks for evaluating the performance of syndromic surveillance system.