INVITED SPEAKER

Peihua Qiu is a professor and the founding chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Florida. Qiu has made substantial contributions in the research areas of jump regression analysis, image processing, statistical process control, survival analysis, dynamic disease screening, and spatio-temporal disease surveillance.

So far, he has published two research monographs and over 140 research papers in refereed journals in these areas. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected fellow of the American Society for Quality, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He served as an associate editor for a number of top statistical journals, including Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrics, and Technometrics. He was the editor of the flagship statistical journal Technometrics during 2014-2016.

Title: New Statistical Method for Spatio-Temporal Surveillance of Infectious Diseases

Abstract: 

Online sequential monitoring of the incidence rates of infectious diseases is critically important for public health. Governments have invested a great amount of resources in building global, national and regional disease reporting and surveillance systems. In these systems, conventional control charts, such as the cumulative sum (CUSUM) and the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) charts, are routinely included for disease surveillance purposes. However, these charts require many assumptions on the observed data that are rarely valid in practice, making their results unreliable. In this talk, we present a new sequential monitoring approach for spatio-temporal disease surveillance, which can accommodate the dynamic nature of the observed disease incidence rates, spatio-temporal data correlation, and nonparametric data distribution. It is shown that the new method is more reliable to use in practice than the commonly used conventional control charts for spatio-temporal surveillance of infectious diseases