Formal Concept Analysis of Rodent Carriers of Zoonotic Disease
This work addresses the problem of identifying potential zoonotic disease carriers in rodents for public health and wildlife management, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new dataset.
The researchers applied Formal Concept Analysis to rodent trait data to identify species that carry zoonotic diseases, resulting in rules-of-thumb about biological features for targeting field surveillance efforts.
The technique of Formal Concept Analysis is applied to a dataset describing the traits of rodents, with the goal of identifying zoonotic disease carriers,or those species carrying infections that can spillover to cause human disease. The concepts identified among these species together provide rules-of-thumb about the intrinsic biological features of rodents that carry zoonotic diseases, and offer utility for better targeting field surveillance efforts in the search for novel disease carriers in the wild.