With COVID-19 sweeping across the globe with near impunity, it is thwarting governments and health organizations efforts to contain it. Not since the 1918 Spanish Flu have citizens of developed countries experienced such a large-scale disease outbreak that is having devastating health and economic impacts. One reason such outbreaks are not more common has been the success of the public health community, including epidemiologists and biostatisticians, in identifying and then mitigating or eliminating the outbreaks. Monitoring the Health of Populations by Tracking Disease Outbreaks: Saving Humanity from the Next Plague is the story of the application of statistics for disease detection and tracking. The work of public health officials often crucially depends on statistical methods to help discern whether an outbreak may be occurring and, if there is sufficient evidence of an outbreak, then to locate and track it. Statisticians also help collect critical information, and they analyze the resulting data to help investigators zero in on a cause for a disease. With the recent outbreaks of diseases such as swine and bird flu, Ebola, and now COVID-19, the role that epidemiologists and biostatisticians play is more important than ever. Features: * Discusses the crucial roles of statistics in early disease detection. * Outlines the concepts and methods of disease surveillance. * Covers surveillance techniques for communicable diseases like Zika and chronic diseases such as cancer. * Gives real world examples of disease investigations including smallpox, syphilis, anthrax, yellow fever, and microcephaly (and its relationship to the Zika virus). Via the process of identifying an outbreak, finding its cause, and developing a plan to prevent its reoccurrence, this book tells the story of how medical and public health professionals use statistics to help mitigate the effects of disease. This book will help readers understand how statisticians and epidemiologists help combat the spread of such diseases in order to improve public health across the world.

With COVID-19 sweeping across the globe with near impunity, it is thwarting governments and health organizations efforts to contain it. Not since the 1918 Spanish Flu have citizens of developed countries experienced such a large-scale disease outbreak that is having devastating health and economic impacts. One reason such outbreaks are not more common has been the success of the public health community, including epidemiologists and biostatisticians, in identifying and then mitigating or eliminating the outbreaks. Monitoring the Health of Populations by Tracking Disease Outbreaks: Saving Humanity from the Next Plague is the story of the application of statistics for disease detection and tracking. The work of public health officials often crucially depends on statistical methods to help discern whether an outbreak may be occurring and, if there is sufficient evidence of an outbreak, then to locate and track it. Statisticians also help collect critical information, and they analyze the resulting data to help investigators zero in on a cause for a disease. With the recent outbreaks of diseases such as swine and bird flu, Ebola, and now COVID-19, the role that epidemiologists and biostatisticians play is more important than ever. Features: * Discusses the crucial roles of statistics in early disease detection. * Outlines the concepts and methods of disease surveillance. * Covers surveillance techniques for communicable diseases like Zika and chronic diseases such as cancer. * Gives real world examples of disease investigations including smallpox, syphilis, anthrax, yellow fever, and microcephaly (and its relationship to the Zika virus). Via the process of identifying an outbreak, finding its cause, and developing a plan to prevent its reoccurrence, this book tells the story of how medical and public health professionals use statistics to help mitigate the effects of disease. This book will help readers understand how statisticians and epidemiologists help combat the spread of such diseases in order to improve public health across the world.

This is the first three chapters of a textbook for data scientists who want to improve how they work with, analyze, and extract information from data. The focus of the textbook is how to appropriately apply statistical methods, both simple and sophisticated, to 21st century data and problems. This book contains the first three chapters: Introduction -- Data Science and Statistics, Descriptive Statistics, and Data Visualization -- as well as the book front matter. Subsequent chapters will be published in 3- to 5-chapter sets as they become available. The textbook is intended for current and future data scientists, and for anyone interested in deriving information from data. It requires some mathematical sophistication on the part of the reader, as well as comfort using computers and statistical software. Data science is a new field that has arisen to exploit the proliferation of data in the modern world. Mathematical statistics dates back to the mid-18th century, where the field began as the systematic collection of population and economic data by nations. The modern practice of statistics - which includes the collection, summarization, and analysis of data - dates to the early 20th century. Today statistical methods are widely used by governments, businesses and other organizations, as well as by all scientific disciplines. It has been said that a data scientist must have a better grasp of statistics than the average computer scientist and a better grasp of programming than the average statistician. This book will give data scientists a firm foundation in statistics.