Site‐occupancy modelling as a novel framework for assessing test sensitivity and estimating wildlife disease prevalence from imperfect diagnostic tests
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary 1. Reliable assessments of infection status and population prevalence are critical for epidemiological modelling and disease management, but can be greatly biased when disease state is determined from imperfect diagnostic tests. Available statistical methods to adjust test‐based prevalence estimates by correcting for test accuracy demand that many stringent requirements and assumptions be met (knowledge about underlying population prevalence or multiple diagnostic methods), limiting their utility for wildlife disease surveys. 2. In this paper, we present site‐occupancy modelling as a flexible approach to derive estimates of population prevalence and test sensitivity under imperfect pathogen detection without a need for restrictive requirements or assumptions. We extend the utility of the standard site‐occupancy framework for pathogen detection data by novel application of abundance‐induced heterogeneity (AIH) models ( Royle & Nichols 2003 ) that allow test sensitivity to vary with host pathogen load or infection intensity. 3. We demonstrate the utility of this approach for wildlife disease studies by applying site‐occupancy models to a data set consisting of replicate quantitative (q)PCR diagnoses of malaria parasites ( Plasmodium spp.) in blood samples from wild blue tits ( Cyanistes caeruleus ). 4. Model selection revealed that Plasmodium detection rates by qPCR were strongly dependent on host parasite load. Estimates of parasite detection rates revealed the qPCR assay to be highly sensitive, with accordingly, a very low probability of false negative diagnosis for the majority of infected hosts in our population and little bias in naive estimates of population prevalence, although this will be a system‐specific result. 5. Our results demonstrate the utility of a site‐occupancy approach for deriving estimates of population prevalence under imperfect pathogen detection and reveal that accounting for host variation in pathogen load allows a more accurate assessment of diagnostic test sensitivity. 6. By identifying factors that influence pathogen detection rates, and revealing optimal protocols for obtaining unbiased prevalence estimates, while minimising the probability of false negative diagnoses, we also show that this approach can enhance both diagnostic accuracy and cost‐efficiency in wildlife disease surveys.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it