TY - JOUR

T1 - TIMESS a power analysis tool to estimate the number of locations and repeated measurements for seasonally and clustered mosquito surveys

AU - Sedda, Luigi

AU - Taylor, Benjamin M.

AU - Cain, Russell

AU - Vajda, Élodie A.

AU - Tatarsky, Allison

AU - Lobo, Neil F.

PY - 2023/7/10

Y1 - 2023/7/10

N2 - Every day, hundreds of mosquito surveys are carried out around the world to inform policy and management decisions on how best to reduce or prevent the burden of mosquito-borne disease or mosquito nuisance. These surveys are usually time consuming and expensive. Mosquito surveillance is the essential component of vector management and control. However, surveillance is often carried out with a limited if not without a quantitative assessment of the sampling effort which can results in underpowered or overpowered studies, or certainly in overpowered studies when power analyses are carried out assuming independence in the measurements obtained from longitudinal and geographically proximal mosquito surveys. Many free, open-source and user-friendly tools to calculate statistical power are available, such as G*Power, glimmpse, powerandsamplesize.com website or R-cran packages (pwr and WebPower to name few of them). However, these tools may not be sufficient for powering mosquito surveys due to the additional properties of seasonal and spatially clustered repeated measurements required to reflect mosquito population dynamics. To facilitate power analysis for mosquito surveillance, we have developed TIMESS, a deployable browser-based Shiny app that estimates the number of repeated measurements and locations of mosquito surveys for a given effect size, power, significance level, seasonality and level of expected between-location clustering. In this article we describe TIMESS, its usage, strengths and limitations.

AB - Every day, hundreds of mosquito surveys are carried out around the world to inform policy and management decisions on how best to reduce or prevent the burden of mosquito-borne disease or mosquito nuisance. These surveys are usually time consuming and expensive. Mosquito surveillance is the essential component of vector management and control. However, surveillance is often carried out with a limited if not without a quantitative assessment of the sampling effort which can results in underpowered or overpowered studies, or certainly in overpowered studies when power analyses are carried out assuming independence in the measurements obtained from longitudinal and geographically proximal mosquito surveys. Many free, open-source and user-friendly tools to calculate statistical power are available, such as G*Power, glimmpse, powerandsamplesize.com website or R-cran packages (pwr and WebPower to name few of them). However, these tools may not be sufficient for powering mosquito surveys due to the additional properties of seasonal and spatially clustered repeated measurements required to reflect mosquito population dynamics. To facilitate power analysis for mosquito surveillance, we have developed TIMESS, a deployable browser-based Shiny app that estimates the number of repeated measurements and locations of mosquito surveys for a given effect size, power, significance level, seasonality and level of expected between-location clustering. In this article we describe TIMESS, its usage, strengths and limitations.

KW - Mosquito sampling

KW - Temporal autocorrelation

KW - Intra- and between-cluster correlation

KW - Correlated measurements

KW - Surveys

U2 - 10.1007/s10479-023-05491-3

DO - 10.1007/s10479-023-05491-3

M3 - Journal article

JO - Annals of Operations Research

JF - Annals of Operations Research

SN - 1572-9338

ER -