building decision models to enrich early warning systems

Research summary:

The project is aimed at building decision models that use the dependence between the variables of interest and publically available data to enrich early warning systems with this easier accessible information. For instance, consider the situation of a seasonal influenza epidemic. This is a major public health concern and an early detection of the outbreak and a decision to take measures can be of of great help. For this detection of epidemic the best data to have would be the one collected by the daily practitioners influenza illness but is hard to obtain sometimes
or is rather delayed. Instead, one can also try to see if an early decision can be made based on the data from other sources like amount of medicine sold related to influenza in an area, number of searches related to influenza illness in search engines from the same area, etc.

Birbal Prasad