Assist. Prof. Athanasios ‘Sakis’ Rakitzis Department of Statistics and Insurance Science, University of Piraeus, Greece. He is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics and Insurance Science, University of Piraeus, Greece. His research topics: Statistical Quality/Process Control, Theory and Applications of Run and Scan Statistics, Applications of Stopping Time and Stopped Sum distributions. He has also received special awards. One of them is a fellowship under the Marie Curie Actions (program IEF - Intra-European Fellowships). Also, he has received a scholarship from the State Scholarship Foundation of Greece, for post-doctoral research in the University of Piraeus. So far, he has published more than 35 articles in internationally peer-review journals. Besides publishing research papers, he has also published 3 book chapters while he has participated to more than 30 national and international conferences.

Title: Improved Statistical Monitoring Procedures for Attributes with Applications in Public Health Surveillance

Abstract: 

The statistical monitoring of public-health or biological data over time, is a scientific area closely related to the domain of statistical process control (SPC); the primary tool of SPC is the control chart. In case of public-health surveillance (or in the monitoring of biological processes), the data are often discrete (count data), assuming to follow a specific, discrete, probability distribution. Usually, in these kind of data an excessive number of zeros exists and, consequently, the application of standard attributes control charts is not valid. Moreover, the distribution of the data cannot be well approximated by the Normal distribution. Thus, new improved schemes are needed in order to deal effectively with the health-related and/or biological outcomes, without leading to incorrect assessments.
In this talk, we provide a general overview of some ordinary methods that are used very often for monitoring health-related processes, highlighting their inadequacy and the need for proper adjustment. Following these lines, we discuss some recent advancements in the area as well as some topics for future research.