Identifying Risk Factors of Pathogens Based on Etiology Study of Infectious Diseases

• Activity Number: 334
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Nong Shang*+
• Companies: CDC
• Keywords: etiology ; latent class analysis ; risk factor ; pathogens

Abstract

Etiology of infectious diseases is often based on one or more laboratory tests such as blood culture and various polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests. Due to imperfect nature of such tests, the etiology of a disease is subject to uncertainty. Latent class analysis is often used to construct etiological pathogen distributions of the disease, both at the global and the individual levels. To identify risk factors for individual pathogen, a distribution based generalized logistic regression approach was proposed. This approach avoids the problem of assigning a specific pathogen to an individual, either systematically or through random sampling from the pathogen distributions. The property of the approach are discussed and the results are compared with the regular approaches.