Monitoring Food Safety by Detecting Patterns in Consumer Complaints (2006)

Artur Dubrawski, Kimberly Elenberg, Andrew Moore, Maheshkumar Sabhnani

Abstract

EPFC (Emerging Patterns in Food Complaints) is the
analytical component of the Consumer Complaint
Monitoring System, designed to help the food safety
officials to efficiently and effectively monitor incoming
reports of adverse effects of food on its consumers. These
reports, collected in a passive surveillance mode, contain
multi-dimensional, heterogeneous and sparse snippets of
specific information about the consumers’ demographics,
the kinds, brands and sources of the food involved,
symptoms of possible sickness, characteristics of foreign
objects which could have been found in food, involved
locations and times of occurrences, etc. Statistical data
mining component of the system empowers its users,
allowing for increased accuracy, specificity and timeliness
of detection of naturally occurring problems as well as of
potential acts of agro-terrorism. The system’s main purpose
is to enhance discovery and mitigation of food borne threats
to public health in the USDA Food Safety Inspection
Service regulated products. As such, it is being envisioned
as one of the key components of the nationwide bio-security
protection infrastructure. It has been accepted for use and it
is currently going through the final stages of deployment.
This paper explains the motivation, key design concepts and
reports the system’s utility and performance observed so
far.

Full text

Download (application/pdf, 387.6 kB)

Approximate BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{IAAI0602DubrawskiA,
    Year = {2006},
    Booktitle = {Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI/IAAI 2006},
    Author = { Artur Dubrawski, Kimberly Elenberg, Andrew Moore, Maheshkumar Sabhnani },
    Title = {Monitoring Food Safety by Detecting Patterns in Consumer Complaints}
}