Fall 2007 Thursday, December 6   Gideon Zamba Department of Biostatistics University of Iowa "A Bayesian Analytical Tool for ILI Control and Detection of Intentional Release" 3:00 Refreshments in 241 Schaeffer Hall 3:30 Talk in 140 Schaeffer Hall This work presents a Bayesian approach to influenza control through the use of sequential update technique, in order to build a detection algorithm for influenza outbreak and potential intentional release of biological agents. The objective is to find evidence of outbreak against a background in which markers of possible intentional release are non-stationary and serially dependent. Our work takes on the US Sentinel influenza-like-illnesses (ILI) data to find this evidence, and to address some issues related to the control of ILI. Our model uses an observed %ILI, defines an initial prior, builds a recursive and sequential update method by finding the posterior distribution of the incidence of ILI at each stage, and setting it as a prior distribution for the next stage. We also use a historical data to set a threshold model based on successive differences in posterior coverage probability. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to assess timeliness, correct alarm, and missed alarm rates of our technique.

All talks are free and open to the public. To receive colloquium reminders via email, please send a request to statistics@uiowa.edu. The 37th Annual Craig Lectures will be on October 11 and 12. Our speaker this year is Nancy Reid from the University of Toronto. Past colloquia: Spring 2007 | Fall 2006 | Spring 2006 | Fall 2005 | Spring 2005 | Fall 2004 | Spring 2004 | Fall 2003 | Spring 2003 | Fall 2002 | Spring 2002 | Fall 2001 | Spring 2001 | Fall 2000 | Spring 2000 | Fall 1999 | Spring 1999 | Fall 1998 | Spring 1998

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