Disease Outbreak Investigation

Objective & Methodology

In light of the serious situation that Smartpolis faces (several deaths reported!), I need to:

1. Source: Determine origin of disease outbreak

2. Spread: Find out medium of transmission

3. Control: Suggest measures to contain spread

My approach to this problem is:

Action Step	Result
Filter blog text for spots of flu	Exclude non-disease blogs from analysis
Determine type of symptoms	Categorise symptoms into water, air or human
Correlate spots with map and time	Animate disease outbreak path by timelapse
Drill down into water-borne	Study the origin, spread and contributing factor
Drill down into air-borne	Study the origin, spread and contributing factor
Drill down into human-transmitted	Study the origin, spread and contributing factor

So that I can suggest containment measures and geo-fencing for each of the transmission type.

Data Preparation

Efforts are needed to transform the "Microblog" dataset into a format that is conducive for visualization.

Variable	Treatment	Tool	Remark
Location	Break into "Lat" and "Lon" respectively	SAS EG	SAS EG workflow to prepare Lat/Lon and save to library
Text	Find meaningful symptoms	SAS EG	According to pre-defined list of common symptoms
Adhoc	Transformation as necessary	Tableau	Visualization tricks