Published 09 June 2021
In disease modeling, a key statistical problem is the estimation of tail probabilities of health events from given data sets of small size and limited range. This particularly affects the surveillance of communicable diseases that have few cases in general but may resurge after a period of time.
By fusion of data from neighboring counties, Dr. Saumyadipta Pyne and his collaborators at University of Maryland modeled the regional outbreaks of pertussis in Washington state in 2012. Their study, Multivariate Tail Probabilities: Predicting Regional Pertussis Cases in Washington State, was published in Entropy (2021 Special Issue on Modeling and Forecasting of Rare and Extreme Events). Image courtesy: CDC.