VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zhidong Cao
dblp:23/7601
· DBLP profile ↗
22ranked-venue papers
0as first author
16since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 10 · 10 since 2021Security and privacy · 7 · 3 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 3 · 3 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Enhancing Knowledge Graph Completion With Structural-Semantic Integration and Contrastive LearningabstractKnowledge graph completion (KGC) addresses the issue of incomplete knowledge graphs by inferring missing triples, which is crucial for information retrieval, question answering, and recommender systems. Existing KGC methods generally focus on either exploiting the graph’s structural topology or leveraging the semantic information from entity descriptions. However, existing approaches often overlook the synergy between structure information and semantic information. To address the existing shortcomings, we proposeStrucSem, a novel model that leverages both structural and semantic information to boost KGC performance. Our model: 1) encodes the graph’s structural information by aggregating neighborhood data around the query entity using an attention mechanism; and 2) combines this with the encoding of textual descriptions, facilitating the integration of both types of information. Additionally, we extend contrastive learning to incorporate multiple positive samples, improving the model’s ability to represent diverse relational patterns. Our approach significantly enhances KGC performance, as demonstrated through extensive evaluations on standard benchmark datasets. The results highlight the superiority of combining structural and semantic information, offering new insights into improving KGC tasks. Chunmiao Yu, Zikang Wang, Tianyi Luo, Zhidong Cao |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 5 |
| 2025 | Decoupling Local and Cross-Regional Transmission Dynamics for Enhanced COVID-19 ForecastingabstractThe increasing frequency and complexity of infectious disease outbreaks, exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, underscore the urgent need for accurate and adaptive epidemic forecasting models. Recently, spatio-temporal graph neural networks have shown potential in modeling infectious disease spread, as they effectively capture the interplay between spatial and temporal dependencies. However, existing STGNN-based approaches often treat disease transmission as a single, unified process, overlooking the distinct mechanisms underlying local and cross-regional spread. In this study, we propose D-STEM, a novel framework that decouples local and spillover transmission dynamics to achieve more precise predictions. Our approach integrates a hybrid local evolution module, combining GRU and self-attention mechanisms to model intra-regional transmission, and employs dynamic spatio-temporal convolution alongside population mobility networks to capture cross-regional transmission. Crucially, we introduce physical constraints to guide the disentanglement of these two mechanisms, ensuring that each module learns distinct features even in the absence of direct observations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets, including US-state and Japan-prefecture COVID-19 data, demonstrate that D-STEM consistently outperforms all baselines. Our framework advances epidemic forecasting and provides actionable insights for public health interventions. Jiaqiang Fei, Zhidong Cao, Tianyi Luo |
IJCNN | 2 |
| 2024 | Modeling the Coupling Propagation of Information, Behavior, and Disease in Multilayer Heterogeneous NetworksabstractWith the development of internet, transportation network, and other technologies, the transmission of information and disease presents complex and diverse new modes, which are mainly manifested as the coupling transmission of information and disease in the cyber–physical–social space. Inspired by this phenomenon, this article proposes a multilayer network-based information–behavior–disease coupling (IBDN) transmission model for the process of information diffusion–behavior change–disease transmission. The IBDN model considers various factors such as psychological drivers of information dissemination, the impact of herd mentality on behavioral transmission, the disease transmission dynamics of the current COVID-19 Omicron mutant strain and relevant countermeasures, and the interconnections between information, behavior, and disease transmission. Furthermore, within the framework of the COVID-19 Omicron mutant strain pandemic, the proposed IBDN model was leveraged to assess the effects of the propagation parameters of each layer and the interlayer coupling parameters on the magnitude of the COVID-19 outbreak and the strain on medical resources. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to determine the variability of the basic reproductive number of the Omicron mutant strains across various nations. Finally, the findings of the experiment were subjected to a thorough examination of policy implications to furnish valuable perspectives for the formulation of effective epidemic prevention strategies in the face of severe COVID-19 situation. Tianyi Luo, Zhidong Cao, Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Qingpeng Zhang |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 3 |
| 2024 | Socially Governed Energy Hub Trading Enabled by Blockchain-Based TransactionsabstractDecentralized trading schemes involving energy prosumers have prevailed in recent years. Such schemes provide a pathway for increased energy efficiency and can be enhanced by the use of blockchain technology to address security concerns in decentralized trading. To improve transaction security and privacy protection while ensuring desirable social governance, this article proposes a novel two-stage blockchain-based operation and trading mechanism to enhance energy hubs connected with integrated energy systems (IESs). This mechanism includes multienergy aggregators (MAGs) that use a consortium blockchain and its enabled proof-of-work (PoW) to transfer and audit transaction records, with social governance principles for guiding prosumers’ decision-making in the peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction management process. The uncertain nature of renewable generation and load demand are adequately modeled in the two-stage Wasserstein-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO). The practicality of the proposed mechanism is illustrated by several case studies that jointly show its ability to handle an increased renewable generation capacity, achieve a 16.7% saving in the audit cost, and facilitate 2.4% more P2P interactions. Overall, the proposed two-stage blockchain-based trading mechanism provides a practical trading scheme and can reduce redundant trading amounts by 6.5%, leading to a further reduction of the overall operation cost. Compared to the state-of-the-art benchmark methods, our mechanism exhibits significant operation cost reduction and ensures social governance and transaction security for IES and energy hubs. Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Shuangqi Li, Zhidong Cao, Paul Jen-Hwa Hu, Chenghong Gu, Xiaohe Yan, Da Huo 0001, Tianyi Luo, Zikang Wang |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 3 |
| 2024 | Energy-Social Manufacturing for Social ComputingabstractThis article explores social manufacturing (SM) within cyber–physical–social systems (CPSSs), leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize energy prosumer networks. We introduce a blockchain-enabled operation and management mechanism for energy systems, incorporating energy aggregators for efficient transaction audits and employing consortium blockchain and proof-of-work for enhanced security. Guided by social governance principles and utilizing the soft actor–critic (SAC) approach for handling renewable generation and load demand uncertainties, our method offers a resilient and cost-effective solution. Simulated case studies reveal a 16.7% reduction in audit costs and a 2.4% increase in peer-to-peer transactions, highlighting improved network synergy. Our approach also reduces redundant trading by 6.5%and cuts operational costs by up to 6%, demonstrating the effectiveness of blockchain in improving cost-efficiency and enhancing social governance and security in energy manufacturing systems. The findings of this study contribute a novel vista to the ongoing discourse in SM, illustrating the formidable potential of advanced information and AI technologies in amplifying the operational acumen of contemporary manufacturing ecosystems. Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Shuangqi Li, Yanjia Wang, Paul Jen-Hwa Hu, Chenye Wu, Zhidong Cao, Faith Xue Fei |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 6 |
| 2023 | Named Entity Recognition for Epidemiological Investigation in COVID-19abstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has had a global impact on communities, economies, and healthcare systems. To control the virus's spread, numerous epidemiological investigations have been made available online, leading to a growing demand for automated tools to extract valuable information from case reports and reduce the burden on news reporters. In response to this growing need, we have meticulously curated a comprehensive data set of COVID-19 epidemiological investigation corpora, specifically designed for named entity recognition (NER) applications. This data set enables researchers and analysts to efficiently identify and extract key information from the case reports, streamlining the process of understanding and communicating the findings. To further enhance the effectiveness of NER in the context of epidemiological investigations, we evaluated and compared the performance of three cutting-edge, pre-trained model-based methods: BERT-BiLSTM-CRF, ERNIE-BiLSTM- CRF and ALBERT-BiLSTM-CRF. All techniques demonstrated impressive performance in recognizing named entities within the case reports, showcasing their potential to revolutionize the way in which epidemiological data is analyzed and disseminated. By leveraging these advanced NER techniques, we aim to facilitate more accurate and timely reporting, ultimately contributing to better-informed decision-making processes and improved public health outcomes. Chunmiao Yu, Zhidong Cao, Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Daniel Dajun Zeng, Tianyi Luo |
ISI | 2 |
| 2023 | A review of wearable sensors based fall-related recognition systems
Xiaohu Li, Shanshan Huang 0004, Rui Chao, Zhidong Cao, Shu Wang 0005, Aiguo Wang 0002, Li Liu 0001 |
Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell. | 5 |
| 2023 | A cross-lingual transfer learning method for online COVID-19-related hate speech detection
Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Daniel Dajun Zeng, Paul Jen-Hwa Hu, Qingpeng Zhang, Yin Luo, Zhidong Cao |
Expert Syst. Appl. | 8 |
| 2023 | Optimal adaptive nonpharmaceutical interventions to mitigate the outbreak of respiratory infections following the COVID-19 pandemic: a deep reinforcement learning study in Hong Kong, ChinaabstractBACKGROUND: Long-lasting nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) suppressed the infection of COVID-19 but came at a substantial economic cost and the elevated risk of the outbreak of respiratory infectious diseases (RIDs) following the pandemic. Policymakers need data-driven evidence to guide the relaxation with adaptive NPIs that consider the risk of both COVID-19 and other RIDs outbreaks, as well as the available healthcare resources. METHODS: Combining the COVID-19 data of the sixth wave in Hong Kong between May 31, 2022 and August 28, 2022, 6-year epidemic data of other RIDs (2014-2019), and the healthcare resources data, we constructed compartment models to predict the epidemic curves of RIDs after the COVID-19-targeted NPIs. A deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model was developed to learn the optimal adaptive NPIs strategies to mitigate the outbreak of RIDs after COVID-19-targeted NPIs are lifted with minimal health and economic cost. The performance was validated by simulations of 1000 days starting August 29, 2022. We also extended the model to Beijing context. FINDINGS: Without any NPIs, Hong Kong experienced a major COVID-19 resurgence far exceeding the hospital bed capacity. Simulation results showed that the proposed DRL-based adaptive NPIs successfully suppressed the outbreak of COVID-19 and other RIDs to lower than capacity. DRL carefully controlled the epidemic curve to be close to the full capacity so that herd immunity can be reached in a relatively short period with minimal cost. DRL derived more stringent adaptive NPIs in Beijing. INTERPRETATION: DRL is a feasible method to identify the optimal adaptive NPIs that lead to minimal health and economic cost by facilitating gradual herd immunity of COVID-19 and mitigating the other RIDs outbreaks without overwhelming the hospitals. The insights can be extended to other countries/regions. Hanchu Zhou, Zhidong Cao, Daniel Dajun Zeng, Qingpeng Zhang |
J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc. | 3 |
| 2023 | A Deep Learning Approach for Semantic Analysis of COVID-19-Related Stigma on Social MediaabstractThe rapid spread of the pandemic of coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) has created an unprecedented, global health disaster. During the outburst period, the paucity of knowledge and research aggravated devastating panic and fears that lead to social stigma and created serious obstacles to contain the disastrous epidemic. We propose a deep learning-based method to detect stigmatized contents on online social network (OSN) platforms in the early stage of COVID-19. Our method performs a semantic-based quantitative analysis to unveil essential spatial-temporal characteristics of COVID-19 stigmatization for timely alerts and risk mitigation. Empirical evaluations are carried out to examine our method’s predictive utilities. The visualization results of the co-occurrence network using Gephi indicate two distinct groups of stigmatized words that pertain to people in Wuhan and their dietary behaviors, respectively. Netizens’ participations and stigmatizations in the Hubei region, where the COVID-19 broke out, are twice ($p < 0.05$) and four ($p < 0.01$) times more frequent and intense than those in other parts of China, respectively. Also, the number of COVID-19 patients is correlated with COVID-19-related stigma significantly (correlation coefficient = 0.838,$p < 0.01$). The responses to individual users’ posts have the power law distribution, while posts by official media appear to attract more responses (e.g., likes, replies, and forward). Our method can help platforms and government agencies manage public health disasters through effective identification and detailed analyses of social stigma on social media. Zhidong Cao, Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Paul Jen-Hwa Hu, Daniel Dajun Zeng, Yin Luo |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 2 |
| 2023 | Two-Stage Co-Optimization for Utility-Social Systems With Social-Aware P2P TradingabstractEffective utility system management is fundamental and critical for ensuring the normal activities, operations, and services in cities and urban areas. In that regard, the advanced information and communication technologies underpinning smart cities enable close linkages and coordination of different subutility systems, which is now attracting research attention. To increase operational efficiency, we propose a two-stage optimal co-management model for an integrated urban utility system comprised of water, power, gas, and heating systems, namely, integrated water-energy hubs (IWEHs). The proposed IWEH facilitates coordination between multienergy and water sectors via close energy conversion and can enhance the operational efficiency of an integrated urban utility system. In particular, we incorporate social-aware peer-to-peer (P2P) resource trading in the optimization model, in which operators of an IWEH can trade energy and water with other interconnected IWEHs. To cope with renewable generation and load uncertainties and mitigate their negative impacts, a two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is developed to capture the uncertainties, using a semidefinite programming reformulation. To demonstrate our model’s effectiveness and practical values, we design representative case studies that simulate four interconnected IWEH communities. The results show that DRO is more effective than robust optimization (RO) and stochastic optimization (SO) for avoiding excessive conservativeness and rendering practical utilities, without requiring enormous data samples. This work reveals a desirable methodological approach to optimize the water–energy–social nexus for increased economic and system-usage efficiency for the entire (integrated) urban utility system. Furthermore, the proposed model incorporates social participations by citizens to engage in urban utility management for increased operation efficiency of cities and urban areas. Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Shuangqi Li, Paul Jen-Hwa Hu, Zhidong Cao, Chenghong Gu, Xiaohe Yan, Da Huo 0001, Ignacio Hernando-Gil |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 4 |
| 2022 | Role of Asymptomatic COVID-19 Cases in Viral Transmission: Findings From a Hierarchical Community Contact Network ModelabstractAs part of ongoing efforts to contain the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, understanding the role of asymptomatic patients in the transmission system is essential for infection control. However, the optimal approach to risk assessment and management of asymptomatic cases remains unclear. This study proposed a Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, No symptoms, Hospitalized and reported, Recovered, Death (SEINRHD) epidemic propagation model. The model was constructed based on epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 in China and accounting for the heterogeneity of social contact networks. The early community outbreaks in Wuhan were reconstructed and fitted with the actual data. We used this model to assess epidemic control measures for asymptomatic cases in three dimensions. The impact of asymptomatic cases on epidemic propagation was examined based on the effective reproduction number, abnormally high transmission events, and type and structure of transmission. Management of asymptomatic cases can help flatten the infection curve. Tracing 75% of the asymptomatic cases corresponds to a 32.5% overall reduction in new cases (compared with tracing no asymptomatic cases). Regardless of population-wide measures, household transmission is higher than other types of transmission, accounting for an estimated 50% of all cases. The magnitude of tracing of asymptomatic cases is more important than the timing; when all symptomatic patients were traced, tested, and isolated in a timely manner, the overall epidemic was not sensitive to the time of implementing the measures to trace asymptomatic patients. Disease control and prevention within families should be emphasized during an epidemic.Note to Practitioners—This article addresses the urgent need to assess the risk of another COVID-19 outbreak caused by asymptomatic cases and to find the optimal, most practical approach to asymptomatic case management. Previous studies mostly focused on the clinical and statistical characteristics of asymptomatic cases; few have evaluated the impact of asymptomatic case measures using mathematical modeling at the community scale. This study proposed a Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, No symptoms, Hospitalized and reported, Recovered, Death (SEINRHD) propagation model based on local community structures and social contact networks, according to the development characteristics and trend of COVID-19 in a Chinese community. The conclusion provides theoretical support for emergency work of relevant departments in different periods of an epidemic. In the early stages of the epidemic, timely detection and isolation of symptomatic patients should be a priority. Where there are surplus resources for epidemic prevention, the authorities should consider increasing the proportion of asymptomatic patients being traced. Epidemic prevention measures among family members should be a primary focus of attention. This combination of strategies can help reduce the rate of viral transmission and result in extinguishing the epidemic. Tianyi Luo, Zhidong Cao, Yuejiao Wang, Daniel Dajun Zeng, Qingpeng Zhang |
IEEE Trans Autom. Sci. Eng. | 2 |
| 2022 | Cyber-Resilient Multi-Energy Management for Complex SystemsabstractResilience problems from cyber-attacks on information communication technologies exist under their wide usage. False data injection (FDI) judiciously designed by attackers may cause severe consequences such as uneconomic operation and blackouts, particularly multivector energy distribution systems (MEDS), which are closely linked and interdependent. This article addresses the cyber resilient issues of an MEDS caused by FDI, considering the uncertainty from renewable resources. A novel two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is proposed to realize the day-ahead and real-time resilience improvement. The ambiguity set is based on both the Wasserstein distance and moment information. Compared to robust optimization which considers the worst case, DRO yields less-conservative solutions and thus provides more economic operation schemes. The Wasserstein metric-based ambiguity set enables to provide additional flexibility hedging against renewable uncertainty. Case studies are demonstrated on two representative MEDS networked with energy hubs, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed cybersecured model. The produced adaptive robust economic operation for MEDS can reduce load shedding and enhance system resilience against severe cyberattacks. Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Zhidong Cao, Daniel Dajun Zeng, Chenghong Gu, Zhaoyu Wang 0001, Yue Xiang, Meysam Qadrdan, Xinlei Chen, Xiaohe Yan, Shuangqi Li |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 2 |
| 2021 | Evaluating the Impact of Vaccination on COVID-19 Pandemic Used a Hierarchical Weighted Contact Network ModelabstractThe 2019 Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) vaccines have been placed significant expectation to end the COVID-19 pandemic sooner. However, issues related to vaccines still need to be resolved urgently, including the vaccination number and range. In this paper, we proposed an epidemic spread model based on the hierarchical weighted network. This model fully considers the heterogeneity of the community social contact network and the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 in China, which enables to evaluate the potential impact of vaccine efficacy, vaccination schemes, and mixed interventions on the epidemic. The results show that a mass vaccination can effectively control the epidemic but cannot completely eliminate it. In the case of limited resources, giving vaccination priority to the individuals with high contact intensity in the community is necessary. Joint implementation with non-pharmacological interventions strengthening the control of virus transmission. The results provide insights for decision-makers with effective vaccination plans and prevention and control programs. Tianyi Luo, Zhidong Cao, Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Daniel Dajun Zeng, Qingpeng Zhang |
ISI | 2 |
| 2021 | Extracting Impacts of Non-pharmacological Interventions for COVID-19 From Modelling StudyabstractCOVID-19 pandemic continues to rampage in the world. Before the achievement of global herd immunity, non-pharmacological interventions(NPIs) are crucial to mitigate the pandemic. Although various NPIs have been put into practice, there are many concerns about the impacts and effectiveness of these NPIs. COVID-19 modelling study (CMS) in epidemiology can provide evidence to solve the aforementioned concerns. It is time-consuming to collect evidence manually when dealing with the vast amount of CMS papers. Accordingly, we seek to accelerate evidence collection by developing an information extraction model to automatically identify evidence from CMS papers. This work presents a novel COVID-19 Non-pharmacological Interventions Evidence (CNPIE) Corpus, which contains 597 abstracts of COVID-19 modelling study with richly annotated entities and relations of the impacts of NPIs. We design a semi-supervised document-level information extraction model (SS-DYGIE++) which can jointly extract entities and relations. Our model outperforms previous baselines in both entity recognition and relation extraction tasks by a large margin. The proposed work can be applied towards automatic evidence extraction in the public health domain for assisting the public health decision-making of the government. Yunrong Yang, Zhidong Cao, Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Daniel Dajun Zeng, Qingpeng Zhang, Yin Luo |
ISI | 2 |
| 2021 | Data-Driven Multi-Energy Investment and Management Under EarthquakesabstractSeismic events can severely damage both electricity and natural gas systems, causing devastating consequences. Ensuring the secure and reliable operation of the integrated energy system (IES) is of high importance to avoid potential damage to the infrastructure and reduce economic losses. This article proposes a new optimal two-stage optimization to enhance the reliability of IES planning and operation against seismic attacks. In the first stage, hardening investment on the IES is conducted, featuring preventive measures for seismic attacks. The second stage minimizes the expected operation cost of emergency response. The random seismic attack is modeled as uncertainty, which is realized after the first stage. An explicit damage assessment model is developed to define the budget set of the uncertain seismic activity. Based on the survivability of transmission lines and gas pipelines of IES, an optimal system investment plan is developed. The problem is formulated as a two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) model, which is tested on an integrated IEEE 30-bus system and 20-node gas network. Case studies demonstrate that the two-stage DRO outperforms robust optimization and a single-stage optimization model in terms of minimizing the investment cost and expected economic loss. This article can help system operators to make economical hardening and operation strategies to improve the reliability of IES under seismic attacks, thus managing a more robust and secure energy system. Alexis Pengfei Zhao, Chenghong Gu, Zhidong Cao, Yichen Shen 0002, Fei Teng 0005, Xinlei Chen, Chenye Wu, Da Huo 0001, Shuangqi Li |
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics | 3 |
| 2019 | Research on Information Dissemination of Public Health Events Based on WeChat: A Case Study of Avian InfluenzaabstractThis paper studied the public opinion dissemination mechanism of public health events such as avian influenza on WeChat. We collected 25,572 posts related to “avian influenza” and “H7N9” from WeChat accounts and proposed the NRT model to simulate the spread of avian influenza public opinion in WeChat. Fitting results show that it can well explain the information dissemination process and mechanism within the WeChat public account. Then the influence of model parameters on the propagation of network public opinion is further studied. Our research can provide a theoretical basis for network public opinion prediction and prevention, and has great significance for the stability of the network environment. Tianyi Luo, Zhidong Cao, Daniel Dajun Zeng |
ISI | 2 |
| 2019 | Social Cognition Construction of the Avian Flu based on Social Media Big DataabstractDuring the high incidence of avian flu, the mainstream media and social media report a lot on the epidemic, mobilizing the people to prevent and control avian flu. This paper collects reports on avian flu from News, Forums, Apps, WeChat and Microblog and forms five data sets. We extract agenda-settings from the News dataset and build agenda-setting networks of the five datasets. Then we use the QAP test to verify the relevance of these agenda-setting networks. We also project the agenda-setting dissimilarity matrices into a two-dimensional space using the MDS method to form cognitive maps, analyzing the cognitive drift of media platforms relative to News. Results show that the agenda-setting networks of Apps and News have the highest correlation coefficient of 0.9193, while Microblog and News have the lowest correlation coefficient of 0.5611. The cognitive maps of Apps, Forum and WeChat have a slight translation and rotation relative to the cognitive map of News. But their relative positional relationship among agenda-settings are similar with News, expect Microblog. Yuejiao Wang, Zhidong Cao |
ISI | 2 |
| 2019 | Healthcare-seeking behavior study on Beijing Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease PatientsabstractHealthcare-seeking behavior (HSB) is the motivation of formulating, developing and changing healthcare policy and medical insurance system, also the important reference of reforming and improving healthcare systems. This paper mainly focused on exploring `Patterns-Drivers' of HSB using a case study on Beijing Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease (HFMD) in China. We extracted the index for HSB and constructed the networks using the heterogeneous information from patients' records, clarified the spatial-temporal distribution of HSB and examined spatial association between HSB and socioeconomic factors using Geographically Weighted Regression. It was found that HFMD morbidity, the spatial distribution of kindergarten, the scale of the public infrastructures such as the park and the toilet was the important local drivers of HSB. The outcome based on the application of complex networks, geographic information system and spatial statistical techniques would provide valuable information supporting the optimal allocation of health resources and decision-making in disease control and prevention. Jinglu Chen, Quannan Zu, Zhidong Cao, Saike He, Daniel Dajun Zeng |
ISI | 4 |
| 2016 | Spatial-temporal patterns and drivers of illicit tobacco trade in Changsha county, ChinaabstractIllicit trade in tobacco products (ITTP) would severely disrupt the market order, greatly threaten citizen's health, and damage the interests of the nation and the consumers, which has attracted great attention of tobacco monopoly administration. Quick and correct detection of the changes and the drivers of ITTP activity would be very significant to the surveillance, tracing, early warning, prediction, prevention and control of the illicit tobacco trade, which are very important challenges for tobacco monopoly administrations in China. In this paper, we introduce spatial-temporal analysis techniques into detecting the spatial-temporal patterns and drivers of ITTP based on the dataset provided by tobacco monopoly administration of Changsha county in Hunan province, China. The results suggested that ITTP in the county mostly occurred along the downtown-county borders, or nearby the toll stations located on the highway, logistics and freight distribution center and the junction of neighboring areas. Positive correlations were found between illegal rate and population density, the number of kindergartens and nursery schools, proximity to the borders, the number of the pupils and the middle school students, which was consistent with the previous study and social etiquette. This study could provide important intelligence and clues for the decision makers and make sure that the resources should be allocated as effectively as possible. Saike He, Yiyuan Xu, Zhidong Cao, Lei Wang 0062, Daniel Dajun Zeng |
ISI | 4 |
| 2013 | An ACP Approach to Public Health Emergency Management: Using a Campus Outbreak of H1N1 Influenza as a Case StudyabstractIn order to tackle the infeasibility of building mathematical models and conducting physical experiments for public health emergencies in the real world, we apply the Artificial societies, Computational experiments, and Parallel execution (ACP) approach to public health emergency management. We use the largest collective outbreak of H1N1 influenza at a Chinese university in 2009 as a case study. We build an artificial society to simulate the outbreak at the university. In computational experiments, aiming to obtain comparable results with the real data, we apply the same intervention strategy as that was used during the real outbreak. Then, we compare experiment results with real data to verify our models, including spatial models, population distribution, weighted social networks, contact patterns, students' behaviors, and models of H1N1 influenza disease, in the artificial society. In the phase of parallel execution, alternative intervention strategies are proposed to control the outbreak of H1N1 influenza more effectively. Our models and their application to intervention strategy improvement show that the ACP approach is useful for public health emergency management. Wei Duan 0002, Zhidong Cao, Youzhong Wang, Bin Zhu 0007, Daniel Dajun Zeng, Fei-Yue Wang 0001, Xiaogang Qiu, Hongbin Song |
IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Syst. | 2 |
| 2010 | Sample surveying to estimate the mean of a heterogeneous surface: reducing the error variance through zoningabstractOne of the major sources of uncertainty associated with geographical data in GIS arises when they are the outcome of a sampling process. It is well known that when sampling from a spatially autocorrelated homogeneous surface, stratification reduces the error variance of the estimator of the population mean. In this study, we evaluate the efficiency of different spatial sampling strategies when the surface is not homogeneous. When the surface is first-order heterogeneous (the mean of the surface varies across the map), we examine the effects of stratifying it into first-order homogeneous zones prior to the usual stratification for a systematic or stratified random sample. We investigate the effect of this form of spatial heterogeneity on the performance of different methods for estimating the population mean and its error variance. We do so by distinguishing between the real surface to be surveyed (ℜ), the sampling frame (ℑ) including the choice of zoning, and the statistical estimators (Ψ). The study shows that zoning improves estimator efficiency when sampling a heterogeneous surface. Systematic comparison provides rules of thumb for choice of sample design, sample statistics and uncertainty estimation, based on considering different spatial heterogeneities on real surfaces. Jinfeng Wang 0001, Robert Haining, Zhidong Cao |
Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci. | 3 |