Objective measures for sentinel surveillance in network epidemiology

The problem of optimizing sentinel surveillance in networks is to find the nodes where an emerging disease outbreak can be discovered early or reliably. Whether the emphasis should be on early or reliable detection depends on the scenario in question. We investigate three objective measures quantifying the performance of nodes in sentinel surveillance—the time to detection or extinction, the time to detection, and the frequency of detection. As a basis for the comparison, we use the susceptible-infectious-recovered model (SIR) on static and temporal networks of human contacts. We show that, for some regions of parameter space, the three objective measures can rank the nodes very differently. As opposed to other problems in network epidemiology, we find rather similar results for the static and temporal networks. Furthermore, we do not find one network structure that predicts the objective measures—that depends both on the data set and the SIR parameter values.