Statistics Seminar: Ross Sparks -- How to detect spatio-temporal clusters very quickly?

Ross Sparks Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics CSIRO 

Location: Carslaw 173 

Time: 2pm Friday, September 24, 2010 

Title: How to detect spatio-temporal clusters very quickly? 

Abstract: Spatio-temporal surveillance methods for detecting outbreaks of disease are
fairly common in the literature with the SCAN statistic setting the benchmark.  If the
shape and size of the outbreaks are known in advance, then the SCAN statistic can be
trained to efficiently detect these, however this is seldom true.  Therefore we want to
devise plans that are efficient at detecting a number of outbreaks that vary in size and
shape.  This paper examines plans which use the exponential weighted moving average
statistic to build temporal memory into plans and tries to develop robust plans for
detecting outbreaks of unknown shapes and sizes.