Public health surveillance with incomplete data - Spatio-temporal imputation for inferring infectious disease dynamics

For thousands of years, infectious diseases have been a major threat to mankind. In order to detect and prevent the epidemics early and effectively, public health surveillance is very important in the disease control efforts. Planning of public health surveillance requires availability of public health data in a certain area, from which the spatial and temporal disease transmission patterns in the data can be discovered and used to set the surveillance sentinels. However, the data missing is often unavoidable in various kinds of epidemic scenarios. Moreover, different kinds of data missing, such as spatial missing, temporal missing, and random missing, make the modeling quite challenging. Existing methods for missing data completion modeled the spatio-temporal correlations only on the target variable but ignored the underlying risk factors, which have been shown playing an important role in making inferences on the target variable (i.e., the number of infected cases). Moreover, the strengths of spatio-temporal correlations, which have been assumed fixed in the existing methods, could dynamically change along with the changes in underlying risk factors. To take the underlying risk factors into consideration for inferring the disease dynamics with incomplete data, in this paper, we propose a novel method called spatio-temporal imputation via kernel-based learning (STI-KL). Specifically, we infer the missing data by determining the location-specific correlations of dynamically changing disease-related risk factors. The spatio-temporal correlations of the target variable are inferred from various disease-related risk factors and geographic distances. To integrate the spatio-temporal learning processes, we develop an alternating algorithm to update the model parameters. Extensive experiments in real-world malaria surveillance and on a systematically designed synthetic dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.