This chapter proposes an enhancement to currently used algorithms for 7 monitoring daily counts of pre-diagnostic data. Rather than use a single algo8 rithm or apply multiple algorithms simultaneously, our approach is based on 9 ensembles of algorithms. The ensembles lead to better performance in terms 10 of higher true alert rates for a given false alert rate. Combinations can be 11 employed a...

I would first like to thank Professor David Buckeridge, Dr Howard Burkom, Dr Krista Hanni, Mr Henry Rolka, and Professors Bill Woodall and Kwok-Leung Tsui for their thoughtful, interesting, and informative commentaries. Given our divergent backgrounds—from local to federal public health, from academia to the CDC, from experience in industrial quality control to applied biosurveillance—I was a b...

Introduction Currently, there’s little effective communication and collaboration among public health departments. The lack of collaboration has resulted in more than 300 separate biosurveillance systems (1), which are disease specific, not integrated or interoperable, and may be duplicative (1). Grid architecture is a promising methodology to aid in building a decentralized health surveillance ...

We greatly appreciate the opportunity to comment on this interesting and thought-provoking paper. Dr Fricker has brought up many important issues with respect to biosurveillance, primarily in the very challenging context of syndromic surveillance and other types of public health surveillance with many input data streams. Similar to Dr Fricker, we have backgrounds in industrial statistical proce...

Public health surveillance is undergoing a revolution driven by advances in the field of information technology. Many countries have experienced vast improvements in the collection, ingestion, analysis, visualization, and dissemination of public health data. Resource-limited countries have lagged behind due to challenges in information technology infrastructure, public health resources, and the...