Representativeness of the FluWatchers Participatory Disease Surveillance Program 2015–2016 to 2018–2019: How do participants compare with the Canadian population?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: FluWatch is Canada's national surveillance system that monitors the spread of influenza. Its syndromic surveillance component monitors the spread of influenza-like illness (ILI) in near-real time for signals of unusual or increased activity. Syndromic surveillance data are collected from two main sources: the Sentinel Practitioner ILI Reporting System and FluWatchers.We evaluated the representativeness of the most recent participant population to understand changes in representativeness since 2015, to identify demographic and geographic gaps and correlates/determinants of participation to characterize a typical participant. METHODS: In this serial cross-sectional study, characteristics of participants during four consecutive influenza seasons (2015-2016, 2016-2017, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019) were compared with the 2016 Canadian Census and the 2015-2016, 2016-2017, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 National Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Coverage Surveys. Associations between demographic factors and the level of user participation were also analyzed among the 2018-2019 FluWatchers population. RESULTS: Infants (0-4 years) and older adults (65 years and older) were under-represented in FluWatchers across all four influenza seasons. Female and urban participants were significantly over-represented. Vaccination coverage remained significantly higher among the FluWatchers populations from the past four influenza seasons across all age groups. Level of participation among FluWatchers was associated with age and vaccination status, but not with sex or geography. Over its four years of implementation, the FluWatchers participant population became more representative of the Canadian population with respect to age and geography (urban/rural and provincial/territorial). CONCLUSION: FluWatchers participants under-represent the tails of Canada's age distribution and over-represent those who engage in health promoting behaviours as indicated by high influenza vaccine coverage, consistent with typical volunteer-based survey response biases. Representativeness would likely improve with targeted recruitment of under-represented groups, such as males, older adults and Canadians living in rural areas.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".