Plots, Puppies & Deadly Disease

Abstract

The Serengeti Health Initiative began in 2003 as a collaboration of the Lincoln Park Zoo and various universities around the world in which a team of veterinarians and researchers have been running a campaign to eliminate rabies from the Serengeti Region of Tanzania. To track the impact of the program, survey data has been collected in sixteen villages over thirteen years of the campaign. In this talk I will explain the dynamics of dog populations within the Serengeti from the unusual perspective of evolving shape versus traditional differential equation-based models. Fluctuations in the survey populations and specific villages surveyed over time created challenges in data organization and in applying traditional time series and population analyses. In this talk I will explain the results obtained via traditional exploratory and regression data analytics, as well alternative statistical methods to discover data patterns and shapes and observe their evolution over time. Finally, I will connect these data discoveries back to their original purpose, the campaign to eliminate rabies in the Serengeti.