Federated epidemic surveillance.

Epidemic surveillance is a challenging task, especially when crucial data is fragmented across institutions and data custodians are unable or unwilling to share it. This study aims to explore the feasibility of a simple federated surveillance approach. We conduct hypothesis tests on count data behin...

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Main Authors: Ruiqi Lyu, Roni Rosenfeld, Bryan Wilder
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2025-04-01
Series:PLoS Computational Biology
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012907
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author Ruiqi Lyu
Roni Rosenfeld
Bryan Wilder
author_facet Ruiqi Lyu
Roni Rosenfeld
Bryan Wilder
author_sort Ruiqi Lyu
collection DOAJ
description Epidemic surveillance is a challenging task, especially when crucial data is fragmented across institutions and data custodians are unable or unwilling to share it. This study aims to explore the feasibility of a simple federated surveillance approach. We conduct hypothesis tests on count data behind each custodian's firewall and then combine p-values from these tests using techniques from meta-analysis. We propose a hypothesis testing framework to identify surges in epidemic-related data streams and conduct experiments on real and semi-synthetic data to assess the power of different p-value combination methods to detect surges without needing to combine or share the underlying counts. Our findings show that relatively simple combination methods achieve a high degree of fidelity and suggest that infectious disease outbreaks can be detected without needing to share or even aggregate data across institutions.
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spelling doaj-art-bcdc53d4410d481a8b394c27f671cb962025-08-20T02:12:23ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS Computational Biology1553-734X1553-73582025-04-01214e101290710.1371/journal.pcbi.1012907Federated epidemic surveillance.Ruiqi LyuRoni RosenfeldBryan WilderEpidemic surveillance is a challenging task, especially when crucial data is fragmented across institutions and data custodians are unable or unwilling to share it. This study aims to explore the feasibility of a simple federated surveillance approach. We conduct hypothesis tests on count data behind each custodian's firewall and then combine p-values from these tests using techniques from meta-analysis. We propose a hypothesis testing framework to identify surges in epidemic-related data streams and conduct experiments on real and semi-synthetic data to assess the power of different p-value combination methods to detect surges without needing to combine or share the underlying counts. Our findings show that relatively simple combination methods achieve a high degree of fidelity and suggest that infectious disease outbreaks can be detected without needing to share or even aggregate data across institutions.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012907
spellingShingle Ruiqi Lyu
Roni Rosenfeld
Bryan Wilder
Federated epidemic surveillance.
PLoS Computational Biology
title Federated epidemic surveillance.
title_full Federated epidemic surveillance.
title_fullStr Federated epidemic surveillance.
title_full_unstemmed Federated epidemic surveillance.
title_short Federated epidemic surveillance.
title_sort federated epidemic surveillance
url https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012907
work_keys_str_mv AT ruiqilyu federatedepidemicsurveillance
AT ronirosenfeld federatedepidemicsurveillance
AT bryanwilder federatedepidemicsurveillance