The use of multiple hypothesis-generating methods in an outbreak investigation of <i>Escherichia coli</i> O121 infections associated with wheat flour, Canada 2016–2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Canadian outbreak investigation into a cluster of Escherichia coli O121 was initiated in late 2016. When initial interviews using a closed-ended hypothesis-generating questionnaire did not point to a common source, cases were centrally re-interviewed using an open-ended approach. The open-ended interviews led cases to describe exposures with greater specificity, as well as food preparation activities. Data collected supported hypothesis generation, particularly with respect to flour exposures. In March 2017, an open sample of Brand X flour from a case home, and a closed sample collected at retail of the same brand and production date, tested positive for the outbreak strain of E. coli O121. In total, 76% (16/21) of cases reported that they used or probably used Brand X flour or that it was used or probably was used in the home during their exposure period. Crucial hypothesis-generating techniques used during the course of the investigation included a centralised open-ended interviewing approach and product sampling from case homes. This was the first outbreak investigation in Canada to identify flour as the source of infection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.006 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".