Main description:

Studies of the spread and containment of disease rely at heart on a variety of mathematical and computational techniques. This collection aims to introduce the fundamentals of epidemiology and to showcase contemporary work using discrete mathematical techniques. Introductory chapters explain the fundamental concepts of epidemiology, the basic tools provided by mathematics and computer science, and some of the outstanding open problems in the area. Contributed articles then highlight particular problems in monitoring disease outbreaks, vaccination strategies, and modelling disease survival factors, and successfully apply techniques such as formal concept analysis, support vector machines, random graph models, and systems of differential equations.

Contents:

Selected data mining concepts by J. Abello, G. Cormode, D. Fradkin, D. Madigan, O. Melnik, and I. Muchnik Descriptive epidemiology: A brief introduction by D. Schneider Biostatistical challenges in molecular data analysis by W. D. Shannon Mining online media for global disease outbreak monitoring by L. Hirschman and L. E. Damianos Generalized contingency tables and concept lattices by D. Ozonoff, A. Pogel, and T. Hannan Graph partitions and concept lattices by J. Abello and A. Pogel Using transmission dynamics models to validate vaccine efficacy measures prior to conducting HIV vaccine efficacy trials by K. Desai, M.-C. Boily, B. Masse, and R. M. Anderson Causal tree of disease transmission and the spreading of infectious diseases by A. Vazquez Structure of social contact networks and their impact on epidemics by S. Eubank, V. S. Anil Kumar, M. V. Marathe, A. Srinivasan, and N. Wang Random graphs (and the spread of infections in a social network) by J. Abello and M. Capalbo Attempting to narrow the integrality gap for the firefighter problem on trees by S. G. Hartke Influences on breast cancer survival via SVM classification in the SEER database by J. Li, I. Muchnik, and D. Schneider Validation of epidemiological models: Chicken epidemiology in the UK by D. Fradkin, I. Muchnik, P. Hermans, and K. Morgan.