Public transportation network scan for rapid surveillance

Abstract

As people move around using public transportation networks such as train and airplanes, it is expected that emerging infectious diseases will spread on the network. The scan statistics approach has been frequently applied to identify high-risk locations, and the results are widely used for making a clinical decision in a timely manner. However, they are not optimally designed for modeling the spread and might not effectively work in the emergency situation where computational time is essentially important. We propose a new scan statistics approach for the public transportation network, called PTNS (Public Transportation Network Scan). PTNS utilizes the available network structure to construct potential candidates of clusters, and thus it can work well especially in situations where public transportation is the main medium of the infection spread. Further, it is designed for rapid surveillance. Lastly, PTNS is generalized to detect space-time clusters by customizing the iteration for potential clusters creation. Using the simulation data generated with a real railway network, we showed that, PTNS outperformed the conventional methods, including Circular- and Flex-scan approaches, in terms of the detection performance, while the computational time is feasible.