Pattern Mining for Outbreak Discovery Preparedness

Today, the objective of public health surveillance system is to reduce the impact of outbreaks by enabling appropriate intervention. Commonly used techniques are based on the changes or aberration in health events when compared with normal history to detect an outbreak. The main problem encountered in outbreaks is high rates of false alarm. High false alarm rates can lead to unnecessary interventions, and falsely detected outbreaks will lead to costly investigation. In this chapter, the authors review data mining techniques focusing on frequent and outlier mining to develop generic outbreak detection process model, named as “Frequent-outlier” model. The process model was tested against the real dengue dataset obtained from FSK, UKM, and also tested on the synthetic respiratory dataset obtained from AUTON LAB. The ROC was run to analyze the overall performance of “frequent-outlier” with CUSUM and Moving Average (MA). The results were promising and were evaluated using detection rate, false positive rate, and overall performance. An important outcome of this study is the knowledge rules derived from the notification of the outbreak cases to be used in counter measure assessment for outbreak preparedness.