43 Spatiotemporal anomaly detection methods for outbreak detection in case-based syphilis surveillance

Oregon Convention Center 

Objective: Timely identification of outliers is critical for disease surveillance and public health intervention. However, real-time outbreak detection on live surveillance data is challenging due to issues including thresholding and the handling of secular trends.
Methods: Five anomaly detection methods were applied to monthly syphilis surveillance data for all US counties from 2014-2021. Known syphilis outbreaks were compiled from the Health Alert Network and state health departments. Summary statistics compared known and detected outbreaks for each method.
Results: Methods accounting for both spatial and temporal components of the data outperformed purely spatial or temporal methods. Spatiotemporal methods correctly detected higher percentages of county-months in a known outbreak state and additional county-months as potential outbreaks as compared to temporal and spatial methods separately.
Discussion: While each method had some success in detecting known syphilis outbreaks, all methods have room for improvement. Future extensions include analyzing multiway stratified demographic data to facilitate the identification of outbreaks otherwise masked by population level noise.

Anomaly detection

Spatiotemporal models and time series

Scan statistics

Signal processing

Disease surveillance

Outbreak detection 

Section on Statistics in Epidemiology