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Taylor's power law and the statistical modelling of infectious disease surveillance data
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Enki, Doyo Gragn, Noufaily, Angela, Farrington, Paddy, Garthwaite, Paul, Andrews, Nick and Charlett, Andre (2017) Taylor's power law and the statistical modelling of infectious disease surveillance data. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), 180 (1). pp. 45-72. doi:10.1111/rssa.12181 ISSN 0964-1998.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12181
Abstract
Surveillance data collected on several hundred different infectious organisms over 20 years have revealed striking power relationships between their variance and mean in successive time periods. Such patterns are common in ecology, where they are referred to collectively as Taylor's power law. In the paper, these relationships are investigated in detail, with the aim of exploiting them for the descriptive statistical modelling of infectious disease surveillance data. We confirm the existence of variance-to-mean power relationships, with exponent typically between 1 and 2. We investigate skewness-to-mean relationships, which are found broadly to match those expected of Tweedie distributions, and thus confirm the relevance of the Tweedie convergence theorem in this context. We suggest that variance- and skewness-to-mean power laws, when present, should inform statistical modelling of infectious disease surveillance data, notably in descriptive analysis, model building, simulation and interval and threshold estimation, threshold estimation being particularly relevant to outbreak detection.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Medicine > Warwick Medical School > Health Sciences Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Medicine > Warwick Medical School > Health Sciences > Statistics and Epidemiology Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Medicine > Warwick Medical School |
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Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) | ||||||
Publisher: | Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd. | ||||||
ISSN: | 0964-1998 | ||||||
Official Date: | January 2017 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 180 | ||||||
Number: | 1 | ||||||
Page Range: | pp. 45-72 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1111/rssa.12181 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) |
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