IJERPH, Vol. 15, Pages 1740: A Bayesian Approach to Real-Time Monitoring and Forecasting of Chinese Foodborne Diseases

IJERPH, Vol. 15, Pages 1740: A Bayesian Approach to Real-Time Monitoring and Forecasting of Chinese Foodborne Diseases International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health doi: 10.3390/ijerph15081740 Authors: Xueli Wang Moqin Zhou Jinzhu Jia Zhi Geng Gexin Xiao Foodborne diseases have a big impact on public health and are often underreported. This is because a lot of patients delay treatment when they suffer from foodborne diseases. In Hunan Province (China), a total of 21,226 confirmed foodborne disease cases were reported from 1 March 2015 to 28 February 2016 by the Foodborne Surveillance Database (FSD) of the China National Centre for Food Safety Risk Assessment (CFSA). The purpose of this study was to make use of the daily number of visiting patients to forecast the daily true number of patients. Our main contribution is that we take the reporting delays into consideration and propose a Bayesian hierarchical model for this forecast problem. The data shows that there were 21,226 confirmed cases reported among 21,866 visiting patients, a proportion as high as 97%. Given this observation, the Bayesian hierarchical model was established to predict the daily true number of patients using the number of visiting patients. We propose several scoring rules to assess the performance of different nowcasting procedures. We conclude that Bayesian nowcasting with consideration of right truncation of the reporting delays has a good performance for short-term...
Source: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research