GEOINFORMATIC SURVEILLANCE DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM Geographic and Network Surveillance for Arbitrarily Shaped Hotspots Next Generation of Geographic Hotspot Detection, Prioritization, and Early Warning with Emerging Hotspots

Our proposed system addresses declared needs for geoinformatic surveillance, software infrastructure, and a decision support system for spatial and spatio-temporal hotspot detection and prioritization. Hotspot means something unusual—an anomaly, aberration, outbreak, elevated cluster, critical area, etc. The declared need may be for monitoring, etiology, management, or early warning. Responsible factors may be natural, accidental, or intentional. This effort will develop novel methods and tools for hotspot detection and prioritization across geographic regions and across networks, based on cutting-edge statistical research and using a variety of data products and sources. This innovative investigation will apply, adapt and validate methods and tools for national applications, such as public health, water management and conservation, carbon management, invasive species management, homeland security, among others, leading to a sophisticated next generation analytical and computational decision support system, beyond the present day health-area-based SaTScan. Our innovation employs the notion of upper level set, and is accordingly called the upper level set scan statistic system. We will also apply, adapt, and validate a prioritization innovation that provides capability for prioritization and ranking of detected hotspots based on multiple criteria indicators without integration of indicators into an index. It employs Hasse diagrams for visualization, and partially ordered sets and MCMC for analysis. Resulting prioritizations and rankings reflect the contrasting requirements of each application and also of varying stakeholders, while employing a common framework for hotspot detection, using data available at high temporal resolutions, and prioritization, using multiple data sources. To provide wide interactive access to dynamically updated knowledge, the project will have online informational and instructiuonal products bulletin, knowledge discovery, and discussion forum, featuring information visualization, user interface design, and GIS linkage as part of the