Federated epidemic surveillance

Abstract

Epidemic surveillance is a challenging task, especially when crucial data is fragmented across institutions and data custodians are unable or unwilling to share it. This study aims to explore the feasibility of a simple federated surveillance approach. We conduct hypothesis tests on count data behind each custodian’s firewall and then combine p-values from these tests using techniques from meta-analysis. We propose a hypothesis testing framework to identify surges in epidemic-related data streams and conduct experiments on real and semi-synthetic data to assess the power of different p-value combination methods to detect surges without needing to combine or share the underlying counts. Our findings show that relatively simple combination methods achieve a high degree of fidelity and suggest that infectious disease outbreaks can be detected without needing to share or even aggregate data across institutions.