BackgroundInfluenza outbreaks affect millions of people every year and its surveillance is usually carried out in developed countries through a network of sentinel doctors who report the weekly number of Influenza-like Illness cases observed among the visited patients. Monitoring and forecasting the evolution of these outbreaks supports decision makers in designing effective interventions and allocating resources to mitigate their impact.ObjectiveDescribe the existing participatory surveillance approaches that have been used for modeling and forecasting of the seasonal influenza epidemic, and how they can help strengthen real-time epidemic science and provide a more rigorous understanding of epidemic conditions.MethodsWe describe three different participatory surveillance systems, WISDM (Widely Internet Sourced Distributed Monitoring), Influenzanet and Flu Near You (FNY), and show how modeling and simulation can be or has been combined with participatory disease surveillance to: i) measure the non-response bias in a participatory surveillance sample using WISDM; and ii) nowcast and forecast influenza activity in different parts of the world (using Influenzanet and Flu Near You).ResultsWISDM-based results measure the participatory and sample bias for three epidemic metrics i.e. attack rate, peak infection rate, and time-to-peak, and find the participatory bias to be the largest component of the total bias. The Influenzanet platform shows that digital participatory surveillance data combined with a realistic data-driven epidemiological model can provide both short-term and long-term forecasts of epidemic intensities, and the ground truth data lie within the 95 percent confidence intervals for most weeks. The statistical accuracy of the ensemble forecasts increase as the season progresses. The Flu Near You platform shows that participatory surveillance data provide accurate short-term flu activity forecasts and influenza activity predictions. The correlation of the HealthMap Flu Trends estimates with the observed CDC ILI rates is 0.99 for 2013-2015. Additional data sources lead to an error reduction of about 40% when compared to the estimates of the model that only incorporates CDC historical information.ConclusionsWhile the advantages of participatory surveillance, compared to traditional surveillance, include its timeliness, lower costs, and broader reach, it is limited by a lack of control over the characteristics of the population sample. Modeling and simulation can help overcome this limitation as well as provide real-time and long-term forecasting of influenza activity in data-poor parts of the world.

Mathematical models of social contagion that incorporate networks of human interactions have become increasingly popular, however, very few approaches have tackled the challenges of including complex and realistic properties of socio-technical systems. In this work we define a framework to characterize the dynamics of the Maki-Thompson rumor spreading model in structured populations, and analytically find a previously uncharacterized dynamical phase transition that separates the local and global contagion regimes. We validate our threshold prediction through extensive Monte Carlo simulations. Furthermore, we apply this framework in two real-world systems, the European commuting and transportation network and the Digital Bibliography and Library Project (DBLP) collaboration network. Our findings highlight the importance of the underlying population structure in understanding social contagion phenomena and have the potential to define new intervention strategies aimed at hindering or facilitating the diffusion of information in socio-technical systems.

We use a data-driven global stochastic epidemic model to project past and future spread of the Zika virus (ZIKV) in the Americas. The model has high spatial and temporal resolution, and integrates real-world demographic, human mobility, socioeconomic, temperature, and vector density data. We estimate that the first introduction of ZIKV to Brazil likely occurred between August 2013 and April 2014 (90% credible interval). We provide simulated epidemic profiles of incident ZIKV infections for several countries in the Americas through February 2017. The ZIKV epidemic is characterized by slow growth and high spatial and seasonal heterogeneity, attributable to the dynamics of the mosquito vector and to the characteristics and mobility of the human populations. We project the expected timing and number of pregnancies infected with ZIKV during the first trimester, and provide estimates of microcephaly cases assuming different levels of risk as reported in empirical retrospective studies. Our approach represents an early modeling effort aimed at projecting the potential magnitude and timing of the ZIKV epidemic that might be refined as new and more accurate data from the region become available.

Increased availability of epidemiological data, novel digital data streams, and the rise of powerful machine learning approaches have generated a surge of research activity on real-time epidemic forecast systems. In this paper, we propose the use of a novel data source, namely retail market data to improve seasonal influenza forecasting. Specifically, we consider supermarket retail data as a proxy signal for influenza, through the identification of sentinel baskets, i.e., products bought together by a population of selected customers. We develop a nowcasting and forecasting framework that provides estimates for influenza incidence in Italy up to 4 weeks ahead. We make use of the Support Vector Regression (SVR) model to produce the predictions of seasonal flu incidence. Our predictions outperform both a baseline autoregressive model and a second baseline based on product purchases. The results show quantitatively the value of incorporating retail market data in forecasting models, acting as a proxy that can be used for the real-time analysis of epidemics.