New Publication in the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics

I co-authored an article in the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics entitled “A Shared Latent Process Model to Correct for Preferential Sampling in Disease Surveillance Systems” led by Dr. Brian Conroy. We designed an approach to address preferential sampling in infectious disease surveillance that incorporates both locational and disease-related components. The locational component describes the spatial pattern of sampled locations in terms of a latent spatial process, which is shared with the disease-related component of the model that describes the abundances of disease positive and negative specimens. We used a simulation-based study and a real-world case study of wildlife rodent specimen in California, U.S.A., to compare our proposed method against two conventional infectious disease surveillance methods. Our proposed method identified the focal high-risk areas and large low-risk areas (e.g., Central Valley) of plague better than the two benchmark methods.