Machine Learning for Drug Overdose Surveillance

ABSTRACT

We describe two recently proposed machine learning approaches for discovering emerging trends in fatal accidental drug overdoses. The Gaussian Process Subset Scan (Herlands, McFowland, Wilson, & Neill, 2017 Neill, D. B. (2017). Multidimensional tensor scan for drug overdose surveillance. Journal of Public Health Informatics, 9(1), e20. doi:10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7598[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) enables early detection of emerging patterns in spatio-temporal data, accounting for both the complex, correlated nature of the data and the fact that detecting subtle patterns requires integration of information across multiple spatial areas and multiple time steps. We apply this approach to 17 years of county-aggregated data for monthly opioid overdose deaths in the New York City metropolitan area, showing clear advantages in the utility of discovered patterns as compared to typical anomaly detection approaches. To detect and characterize emerging overdose patterns that differentially affect a subpopulation of the data, including geographic, demographic, and behavioral patterns (e.g., which combinations of drugs are involved), we apply the Multidimensional Tensor Scan (Neill, 2017 Neill, D. B. (2017). Multidimensional tensor scan for drug overdose surveillance. Journal of Public Health Informatics, 9(1), e20. doi:10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7598[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) to 8 years of case-level overdose data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. We discover previously unidentified overdose patterns which reveal unusual demographic clusters, show impacts of drug legislation, and demonstrate potential for early detection and targeted intervention. These approaches to early detection of overdose patterns can inform prevention and response efforts, as well as understanding the effects of policy changes.     

When the Lord builds the house: An autoethnographic account of working in an evangelical for-profit organizational culture

Religion is often perceived as a private topic, thus belonging outside the traditional conceptualization of a work environment. However, religion is a pervasive organizing framework and an understanding of its role in the workplace is needed from a communicative perspective. In the following autoethnography, I describe my experience working for a Christian for-profit homebuilder – starting with new employee orientation and moving through my final day at Local Homes. I focus on instances where tension emerges between expectations and reality as I learn about and interact within the overtly evangelical Christian organizational culture. The tension is illustrated through four vignettes that correspond to the traditional phases of socialization. Through writing this autoethnographic account, I attempt to move beyond my personal experience and situate my story within larger disciplinary and societal conversations about the socialization process in a religious organization. With this goal in mind, I conclude with methodological and theoretical implications.     

Wealth and inheritance in Britain from 1896 to the present

Personal wealth has grown since the 1970s twice as fast in real terms as national income. Has this rise in the wealth-income ratio led to a corresponding increase in the wealth being passed on from one generation to the next? Are we returning to the levels of inheritance found in the 19th century? The aim of this paper is to construct UK evidence on the extent of the transmission of wealth in the form of estates and gifts inter vivos. It takes a long-run view of inheritance, starting from 1896, when the modern Estate Duty was introduced, and exploits the extensive estate data published over the years. Construction of a long-run time series for more than a century is challenging, and there are important limitations. The resulting time-series demonstrates the major importance of inheritance in the UK before the First World War, when the total transmitted wealth represented some 20 per cent of net national income. In the inter-war period, the total was around 15 per cent, falling to some 10 per cent after the Second World War, and then falling further to below 5 per cent in the late 1970s. Since then, there has indeed been an upturn: a rise from 4.8 per cent in 1977 to 8.2 per cent in 2006. This increase was more or less in line with the increase in personal wealth, and has to be interpreted in the light of the changing net worth of the corporate and public sectors of the economy.     

From classes to copulas: wages,capital, and top incomes

Public debates about the rise in top income shares often focus on the growing dispersion in earnings, and the soaring pay for top executives and financial-sector employees. But can the change in the marginal distribution of earnings on its own explain the rise in top income shares? Are top executives replacing capital owners in the group of top-income earners, or are we rather witnessing a fusion of top capital and top earnings? This paper proposes an extension of the copula framework and uses it for exploring the changing composition of top incomes. It illustrates that changes in top income shares can easily be decomposed into respective changes in the marginal distributions of labour and capital income and the changing association between the two types of income. An application using tax record data from Norway shows that the association between top labour and capital incomes grew stronger between 1995 and 2005 in the top half of the wage and capital income distribution, though it declined for the top 1% of capital income receivers. A gender decomposition demonstrates that the association of wage and capital incomes at the top is particularly striking for men, whilst women are largely under-represented in the top halves of the two marginal distributions.     

Schulstruktur und Bildungsungleichheit: Die Bedeutung von bundeslandspezifischen Unterschieden beim Übergang in die Sekundarstufe I für den BildungserfolgStructure of the education system and educational inequality: the relevance of regional differences in the institutional conditions for educational attainment

The relevance of institutional arrangements concerning the German school system for social inequalities remains comparatively unclear, due to the prevalent use of only simple and mostly static categories. The present study adds to this debate and analyses the effect of different regulations at the transition to upper secondary schools on educational achievement and social inequality. Duration of primary schooling and tracking recommendations are taken into account. Empirical analyses are based on information of the related Education Acts (1985–2010) as well as data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). This approach constitutes a significant advancement as it allows for an overall identification of changes in the institutional features between and within states. Results indicate that children who attend primary schools that cover six instead of four years are more likely to be enrolled in an academic-track Gymnasium. These effects are especially strong for children with lower social background. There is no significant difference between secondary school systems with overall pure early tracking and school systems with fewer school tracks and delayed tracking in the sense that only students who don’t attend upper secondary school aren’t tracked after the fourth grade. Furthermore, the results reveal that the relative importance of (mandatory) track recommendations tends to be lower for children of parents with higher socioeconomic status, even if children in general are more likely to attend the Gymnasium at age 15, when the parents’ freedom of choice isn’t restricted by teachers’ recommendations.     

The Registers of Liberated Africans of the Havana Slave Trade Commission: Implementation and Policy, 1824–1841

The Registers of Liberated Africans that were compiled in the course of British anti-slave trade suppression contain detailed biographical information for individuals who were liberated from slave ships according to international law. These records are invaluable for an analysis of the demography of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and hence it is necessary to assess critically their generation, including who made them and for what reasons. By focusing on the Havana Slave Trade Commission between 1824 and 1841, this essay provides an overview of the registration process of over 10,000 Africans, the structure of the Mixed Commission court, and details on the court officials, including a list of 162 African-born interpreters that resulted in the issuance of emancipation certificates to thousands of Liberated Africans who were subsequently subjected to terms of apprenticeship negotiated by the British and Spanish governments.     

The Effects of Merit-Based Scholarships on Educational Outcomes

This paper analyzes the effect of a statewide merit-based scholarship program on educational outcomes in Arizona. It tests whether Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) scholarship has an effect on a comprehensive set of educational outcomes such as the number of applicants, student admissions, first-year first-time enrollment, ACT scores of entering freshman, retention rates, as well as on the level of tuition and fees at the three schools targeted by the program; Arizona State University, University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University. Both difference-in-differences estimation as well as synthetic control methods shows that AIMS has an economically and statistically significant effect enrollment. Enrollment effects are greatest among African American and Hispanic students and are significant for both men and women. While point estimates suggest that AIMS also lead to increases in tuition and fees, these results are not robust to placebo tests.     

Self-Reported Personal Well-Being of Youth Accessing Intensive Mental Health Treatment

Normative samples have been shown to rate their personal wellbeing (PWB) as positively high and high PWB is associated with many enduring benefits. Cummins (J Happiness Stud 10(6):1–17, 2009) has suggested that PWB has an equilibrium that is set at a rather high positive state and maintained through psychological mechanisms he termed homeostatic protected mood (HPM). Investigators who have explored PWB and mental health disorders have often focused on schizophrenia in adult populations, with varied results, and scant attention has been paid to clinical samples of youth with emotional and/or behavioral disorders. The purpose for this report was to explore the level of PWB reported by a subsample of youth who accessed residential treatment (n = 30) and intensive home based treatment (n = 33) at 12–18 months post-discharge, and explore whether clinical variables could predict PWB. Many youth reported high PWB despite experiencing continued challenges in symptoms and psychosocial functioning. Demographic and clinical characteristics did not predict participants’ PWB scores, lending support for the HPM theory with this sample of youth with emotional and behavioral disorder.