A Novel Non-Parametric Spatiotemporal Scan Statistic: An Application to Detect Disease Outbreaks

The majority of the widely used scan statistics are based on distributional assumptions. Contrary to existing methods, with a new perspective in clustering, Mann-Whitney Scan Statistic was introduced detect clusters continuous data indexed by time or space, without any assumptions parameters set up. We propose an extension that can be applied spatiotemporal distance measure. This novel statistic is distribution-free and seems powerful against parametric statistics. results applicable wide variety domains, including epidemiology, socioeconomic analysis climate sciences, irrespective discrete data.