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Nonparametric Regression

Description

Temporally localized outbreaks occur in the presence of a complex background, greatly complicating both retrospective and real-time detection. Numerous techniques have been proposed for adjusting thresholds to account for this variable background. In this paper, we apply wavelet transforms to detect localized structures in health care time series, using a generalization of many of these viewpoints. A rigorous, nonparametric approach is applied in a general setting to identify coherent outbreaks.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Timely and accurate syndromic surveillance depends on continuous data feeds from healthcare facilities. Typical outlier detection methodologies in syndromic surveillance compare predictions of counts for an interval to observed event counts, either to detect increases in volume associated with public health incidents or decreases in volume associated with compromised data transmission. Accurate predictions of total facility volume need to account for significant variance associated with the time of day and week; at the extreme are facilities which are only open during limited hours and on select days. Models need to account for the cross-product of all hours and days, creating a significant data burden. Timely detection of outages may require sub-hour aggregation, increasing this burden by increasing the number of intervals for which parameters need to be estimated. Nonparametric models for the probability of message arrival offer an alternative approach to generating predictions. The data requirements are reduced by assuming some time-dependent structure in the data rather than allowing each interval to be independent of all others, allowing for predictions at sub-hour intervals.

Objective:

Characterize the behavior of nonparametric regression models for message arrival probability as outage detection tools.

Submitted by elamb on