GeoSurveillance: Software for monitoring change in geographic patterns

Abstract

In this paper we first describe how statistical process control methods in general, and cumulative sum methods in particular, may be used to monitor changes in geographic patterns. We give examples for several different possible data scenarios, including those where regional data consist of very small counts each time period. In addition, we describe software we have developed for this purpose. The paper describes both the development of the statistical methods and the software in detail. The authors intend to make the software freely available and downloadable so that researchers interested in a wide variety of applications may potentially make use of the methods. © Springer-Verlag 2004.