title: A monitoring system to detect increased rates of cancer incidence.
abstract: A new method for monitoring occurrences of rare health events is proposed. This proposed method is similar in principle to the sets technique but is shown to have much better expected time to alarm properties. This is illustrated for a number of hypothetical situations, and then both methods are applied to cancer mortality data. The proposed method will allow the use of large monitoring systems consisting of implementations of the method in a number of subregions (i.e., counties) of a larger region (i.e., state) independently, and still maintain reasonable expected times between false alarms.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: R R
authors.initials: RR
authors.lastname: Sitter
authors.forename: L P
authors.initials: LP
authors.lastname: Hanrahan
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Demets
authors.forename: H A
authors.initials: HA
authors.lastname: Anderson
mesh_terms: D001699:Biometry; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000209:etiology / Q000401:mortality; D011159:Population Surveillance / Q000379:methods*