title: A new method for assessing the risk of infectious disease outbreak.
abstract: Over the past few years, emergent threats posed by infectious diseases and bioterrorism have become public health concerns that have increased the need for prompt disease outbreak warnings. In most of the existing disease surveillance systems, disease outbreak risk is assessed by the detection of disease outbreaks. However, this is a retrospective approach that impacts the timeliness of the warning. Some disease surveillance systems can predict the probabilities of infectious disease outbreaks in advance by determining the relationship between a disease outbreak and the risk factors. However, this process depends on the availability of risk factor data. In this article, we propose a Bayesian belief network (BBN) method to assess disease outbreak risks at different spatial scales based on cases or virus detection rates. Our experimental results show that this method is more accurate than traditional methods and can make uncertainty estimates, even when some data are unavailable.
authors.affiliation: The State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.|The Key Laboratory of Surveillance and Early-Warning on Infectious Disease, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 102206, China.
authors.forename: Yilan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liao
authors.affiliation: The State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.|Sino-Danish College, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China.|Sino-Danish Center for Education and Research, Beijing, 100190, China.
authors.forename: Bing
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: The State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.|The Key Laboratory of Surveillance and Early-Warning on Infectious Disease, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 102206, China.
authors.forename: Jinfeng
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: The State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.|School of Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Beijing 100083, China.
authors.forename: Xiaochi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D001499:Bayes Theorem; D003140:Communicable Disease Control / Q000379:methods*; D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology*; D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000517:prevention & control* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D062665:Epidemiological Monitoring; D006801:Humans; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods*; D012307:Risk Factors