Estimating rates of change to interpret quantitative wastewater surveillance of disease trends.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Wastewater monitoring data can be used to estimate disease trends to inform public health responses. One commonly estimated metric is the rate of change in pathogen quantity, which typically correlates with clinical surveillance in retrospective analyses. However, the accuracy of rate of change estimation approaches has not previously been evaluated.

Objectives

We assessed the performance of approaches for estimating rates of change in wastewater pathogen loads by generating synthetic wastewater time series data for which rates of change were known. Each approach was also evaluated on real-world data.

Methods

Smooth trends and their first derivatives were jointly sampled from Gaussian processes (GP) and independent errors were added to generate synthetic vi

SUBMITTER: Holcomb DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11392626 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature