Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
9
The Role of Data Aggregation in Public
Health and Food Safety Surveillance
Artur Dubrawski
Auton Lab, Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue, NSH 3121, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
awd@cs.cmu.edu
CoNTENTS
9.1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 161
9.2 Scalable Aggregation of Evidence in Multidimensional Event Data.....163
9.3 Aggregation of Evidence across Multiple Streams of Data ................. 170
9.4 Temporal Aggregation for Cross-Stream Analysis............................... 171
9.5 Aggregating Evidence Using Graph Representations.......................... 174
9.6 Conclusions................................................................................................. 178
Acknowledgments .............................................................................................. 178
References............................................................................................................. 179
9.1 Introduction
Data that can be used to support surveillance of public health are becom-
ing available to the analysts at increasing volumes and varieties. Widening
of the availability is accompanied by a rapid rise of the volume, specificity,
and complexity of questions being asked about data. Those processes jointly
exacerbate the challenges related to statistical reliability of the models used
in the analyses, and to statistical significance of the findings. Efficient and
effective implementations of data aggregation strategies can tackle several
of such challenges, including those related to dealing with large volumes
of high-dimensional data, or dealing with low density of useful evidence in
data due to sparseness of patterns of interest and due to high specificity of
analytic questions.
Data aggregation is a prominent component of the analytic processes that
occurs naturally in multiple contexts and phases of data-driven biosurveil-
lance (Burkom et al. 2004). For instance, it is relevant to the task of searching
161
 
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