Predictive AnalysisShilo Anders

Lisa FernRachael Pasini

• THE NEED:

• A representation to explore relationships among interrelated data

• What people are currently doing

• Databases currently collect and attempt to organize information that can be accessed by various interested institutions/bodies

• Data collection tends to be focused on only one topic or source of information

• e.g. weather, demographics, etc.

• Some agencies are currently compiling information from a few sources, but are still limited in scope with regards to region and sources of information

Need Statement

• What we’re doing that’s different than them

• Integrating information from several sources (databases) that may be interrelated

• Combining geo-spatial and functional displays to facilitate exploration of relationships

• Why is this hard?

• Difficulty in recognizing relevant sources of information and integrating them together

• What is the benefit of doing it this way?

• To have access to a broader range of information

• Investigate relationships among various factors

• Generate multiple alternative hypotheses about relationships that were not previously apparent

Need Statement

Laying the foundation...

• How do you predict/track an infectious disease?

• identify and monitor indicators

• Concept map

• organized our thoughts about what are the indicators and how they are connected/disconnected

• created a foundation to understand the problem with indicator detections (problem space)

Indicators

• What are they?

• Definition:

1. a thing, esp. a trend or fact, that indicates the state or level of something

2. a device providing specific information on the state or condition of something, in particular

Indicators• Types of indicators:

• primary: direct symptoms of pathogens/agents/diseases

• secondary: contextual factors that may be connected to pathogens/agents/diseases either by

a. having the potential to facilitate their transmission, or

b. having a correlational relationship

• transmission: methods and agents for transmission, either directly or indirectly

• temporal relationships:

Temporal Relationships

incubation

period

rate of

morbidity

rate of

recovery

transmission

speed

resistance

building

humans/

animals

pathogens

Direct vs. Indirect

transmission

air

soil

water

animals

insects

humans

food/

agriculture

Indicator Detection

Ranges

Primary Indicators

(symptoms)

emergent

similarities

differences

known

diseases

unkown

diseases

Individual vs.

Clusters

Absence vs

Presence

morbidity

mortality

PredictingSpread

Secondary Indicators

region

climateunexpected

climate

change

time of

day

demographics

human social

patterns

genetics

pregnancy

movement

consumerism

productivityage

Which are the most

important?

Infrastructure

media

health

care

economy

policy

short

long

interaction

geneticsskin

contact

blood

transfusions

organ

transplants

breast

milk sexual

contact

Indicator Detection

• How can we use these indicators?

1. Current state: where you are?

• what direction are you facing or are you facing a particular direction at all?

2. Future state: where are you going?

• are you actually going somewhere?

3. Transition state: how far away you are from where you want to be?

• (future state - current state)

Indicator Detection

4. Alert you to a problem

• indicators as diagnoses

• indicators as alerts

• disruption of normalcy

5. Are there certain areas/regions/demographics that are vulnerable?

6. The likelihood of having detected a particular p/a/d(s)

Predicting Spread

• Once you have detected a potential p/a/d, indicators can be used to generate hypotheses about:

• what path you are on, that is, what is the trend (i.e. transmission trajectory) up to the present

• what path(s) you are likely to follow (future thinking), given relationships among the p/a/ds and indicators

Bio-Terrorism

• Once a spread can be mapped based on indicators, the next problem is to identify the spread as a natural occurrence or a bio-terrorist act.

• Indices of the intentional release of a biologic agent include:

• an unusual temporal or geographic clustering of illness

• an unusual age distribution for common diseases

• a large number of cases of acute flaccid paralysis with prominent bulbar palsies (i.e. weakness of muscles or loss of muscle tone), suggestive of a release of botulinum toxin

Display

• Generic display characteristics that would support THE NEED

• Representation Design Guidelines

• Depict relationships in a frame of reference

• Put data in context

• Highlight events

• Highlight contrasts

Display

• Specific design requirements, not necessarily a specific design

• each indicator has its own “layer”

• add/remove layers to explore relationships and form hypotheses

• geo-spatial and functional displays that are easily interchanged/visible

• static and dynamic display control in order to show progression over time (i.e. weather radar map)

Display needs...

• Prediction overlays

• given a prediction, this is how it would look according to the display - hypothesis verifcation/exploration

• Functional relationships

• maps hide these (i.e. when things are far apart, we tend not to couple them)

• supplementing without geo-spatial reference points

• how well is the plan working? not, how far away are we spatially?

• extra temporal aspect (besides trending over time)

• use of graphs?