scholarly journals Evaluation of epidemiological risk using contact tracing open data (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Concilio ◽  
Luigi Di Biasi ◽  
Francesco Marrafino ◽  
Simona Concilio

BACKGROUND During the 2020s, there was extensive debate about the possible use of contact tracing (CT) for SARS-CoV-2 pandemic containment, and concerns have been raised about data security and privacy. Little has been said about the effectiveness of CT. In this work, we present a real data analysis of a CT experiment conducted in Italy for eight months involving more than 100,000 users. OBJECTIVE We discuss the technical and health aspects of a centralized approach. We show the correlation between the acquired contact data and the number of positives to SARS-CoV-2. We analyze CT data to define population behavior, and we show the potential application of real contact tracing data. METHODS CT data were collected, analyzed, and evaluated on the basis of the duration, persistence and frequency of contacts over several months of observation. A statistical test was conducted to determine whether there is a correlation between indices of behavior calculated from the data and the number of new infections in the population (new positives). RESULTS We evidence a correlation between a weighted measure of contacts with the new positives to the virus (Pearson coefficient = 0.86), paving the road to a better and more accurate data analysis and spread prediction. CONCLUSIONS The data are used to determine the most relevant epidemiological parameters and can be used to develop an agent-based system to simulate the effect of restrictions and vaccinations. Finally, we demonstrated the system's ability to identify the physical locations where the probability of infection is highest. All data collected are available to the scientific community for further analysis.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 571
Author(s):  
Sumit Mishra ◽  
Nikhil Singh ◽  
Devanjan Bhattacharya

Short distance travel and commute being inevitable, safe route planning in pandemics for micro-mobility, i.e., cycling and walking, is extremely important for the safety of oneself and others. Hence, we propose an application-based solution using COVID-19 occurrence data and a multi-criteria route planning technique for cyclists and pedestrians. This study aims at objectively determining the routes based on various criteria on COVID-19 safety of a given route while keeping the user away from potential COVID-19 transmission spots. The vulnerable spots include places such as a hospital or medical zones, contained residential areas, and roads with a high connectivity and influx of people. The proposed algorithm returns a multi-criteria route modeled on COVID-19-modified parameters of micro-mobility and betweenness centrality considering COVID-19 avoidance as well as the shortest available safe route for user ease and shortened time of outside environment exposure. We verified our routing algorithm in a part of Delhi, India, by visualizing containment zones and medical establishments. The results with COVID-19 data analysis and route planning suggest a safer route in the context of the coronavirus outbreak as compared to normal navigation and on average route extension is within 8%–12%. Moreover, for further advancement and post-COVID-19 era, we discuss the need for adding open data policy and the spatial system architecture for data usage, as a part of a pandemic strategy. The study contributes new micro-mobility parameters adapted for COVID-19 and policy guidelines based on aggregated contact tracing data analysis maintaining privacy, security, and anonymity.


Author(s):  
Stefano Piotto ◽  
Luigi Di Biasi ◽  
Francesco Marrafino ◽  
Simona Concilio

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rumen Manolov

The lack of consensus regarding the most appropriate analytical techniques for single-case experimental designs data requires justifying the choice of any specific analytical option. The current text mentions some of the arguments, provided by methodologists and statisticians, in favor of several analytical techniques. Additionally, a small-scale literature review is performed in order to explore if and how applied researchers justify the analytical choices that they make. The review suggests that certain practices are not sufficiently explained. In order to improve the reporting regarding the data analytical decisions, it is proposed to choose and justify the data analytical approach prior to gathering the data. As a possible justification for data analysis plan, we propose using as a basis the expected the data pattern (specifically, the expectation about an improving baseline trend and about the immediate or progressive nature of the intervention effect). Although there are multiple alternatives for single-case data analysis, the current text focuses on visual analysis and multilevel models and illustrates an application of these analytical options with real data. User-friendly software is also developed.


Author(s):  
Saheb Foroutaifar

AbstractThe main objectives of this study were to compare the prediction accuracy of different Bayesian methods for traits with a wide range of genetic architecture using simulation and real data and to assess the sensitivity of these methods to the violation of their assumptions. For the simulation study, different scenarios were implemented based on two traits with low or high heritability and different numbers of QTL and the distribution of their effects. For real data analysis, a German Holstein dataset for milk fat percentage, milk yield, and somatic cell score was used. The simulation results showed that, with the exception of the Bayes R, the other methods were sensitive to changes in the number of QTLs and distribution of QTL effects. Having a distribution of QTL effects, similar to what different Bayesian methods assume for estimating marker effects, did not improve their prediction accuracy. The Bayes B method gave higher or equal accuracy rather than the rest. The real data analysis showed that similar to scenarios with a large number of QTLs in the simulation, there was no difference between the accuracies of the different methods for any of the traits.


Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 202
Author(s):  
Louai Alarabi ◽  
Saleh Basalamah ◽  
Abdeltawab Hendawi ◽  
Mohammed Abdalla

The rapid spread of infectious diseases is a major public health problem. Recent developments in fighting these diseases have heightened the need for a contact tracing process. Contact tracing can be considered an ideal method for controlling the transmission of infectious diseases. The result of the contact tracing process is performing diagnostic tests, treating for suspected cases or self-isolation, and then treating for infected persons; this eventually results in limiting the spread of diseases. This paper proposes a technique named TraceAll that traces all contacts exposed to the infected patient and produces a list of these contacts to be considered potentially infected patients. Initially, it considers the infected patient as the querying user and starts to fetch the contacts exposed to him. Secondly, it obtains all the trajectories that belong to the objects moved nearby the querying user. Next, it investigates these trajectories by considering the social distance and exposure period to identify if these objects have become infected or not. The experimental evaluation of the proposed technique with real data sets illustrates the effectiveness of this solution. Comparative analysis experiments confirm that TraceAll outperforms baseline methods by 40% regarding the efficiency of answering contact tracing queries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Cencetti ◽  
G. Santin ◽  
A. Longa ◽  
E. Pigani ◽  
A. Barrat ◽  
...  

AbstractDigital contact tracing is a relevant tool to control infectious disease outbreaks, including the COVID-19 epidemic. Early work evaluating digital contact tracing omitted important features and heterogeneities of real-world contact patterns influencing contagion dynamics. We fill this gap with a modeling framework informed by empirical high-resolution contact data to analyze the impact of digital contact tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate how well contact tracing apps, coupled with the quarantine of identified contacts, can mitigate the spread in real environments. We find that restrictive policies are more effective in containing the epidemic but come at the cost of unnecessary large-scale quarantines. Policy evaluation through their efficiency and cost results in optimized solutions which only consider contacts longer than 15–20 minutes and closer than 2–3 meters to be at risk. Our results show that isolation and tracing can help control re-emerging outbreaks when some conditions are met: (i) a reduction of the reproductive number through masks and physical distance; (ii) a low-delay isolation of infected individuals; (iii) a high compliance. Finally, we observe the inefficacy of a less privacy-preserving tracing involving second order contacts. Our results may inform digital contact tracing efforts currently being implemented across several countries worldwide.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 634
Author(s):  
Tarek Frahi ◽  
Francisco Chinesta ◽  
Antonio Falcó ◽  
Alberto Badias ◽  
Elias Cueto ◽  
...  

We are interested in evaluating the state of drivers to determine whether they are attentive to the road or not by using motion sensor data collected from car driving experiments. That is, our goal is to design a predictive model that can estimate the state of drivers given the data collected from motion sensors. For that purpose, we leverage recent developments in topological data analysis (TDA) to analyze and transform the data coming from sensor time series and build a machine learning model based on the topological features extracted with the TDA. We provide some experiments showing that our model proves to be accurate in the identification of the state of the user, predicting whether they are relaxed or tense.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Marchetti ◽  
M. Moutton ◽  
S. Ludwig ◽  
L. Ibos ◽  
V. Feuillet ◽  
...  

Thermal mapping has been implemented since the late eighties to establish the susceptibility of road networks to ice occurrence with measurements from a radiometer and some atmospheric parameters. They are usually done before dawn during wintertime when the road energy is dissipated. The objective of this study was to establish if an infrared camera could improve the determination of ice road susceptibility, to build a new winter risk index, to improve the measurements rate, and to analyze its consistency with seasons and infrastructures environment. Data analysis obtained from the conventional approved radiometer sensing technique and the infrared camera has shown great similarities. A comparison was made with promising perspectives. The measurement rate to analyse a given road network could be increased by a factor two.


2014 ◽  
Vol 518 ◽  
pp. 356-360
Author(s):  
Chang Qing Liu

By using the empirical likelihood method, a testing method is proposed for longitudinal varying coefficient models. Some simulations and a real data analysis are undertaken to investigate the power of the empirical likelihood based testing method.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document