Evaluating variability and uncertainty separately in microbial quantitative risk assessment using two R packages

Quantitative risk assessment has emerged as a valuable tool to enhance the scientific basis of regulatory decisions in the food safety domain. This article introduces the use of two new computing resources (R packages) specifically developed to help risk assessors in their projects. The first packag...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of food microbiology 2010-09, Vol.142 (3), p.330-340
Main Authors: Pouillot, Régis, Delignette-Muller, Marie Laure
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Biological and medical sciences
Cattle
Colony Count, Microbial
Computer Simulation
Consumer Product Safety
Distribution fitting
Escherichia coli
Food industries
Food Microbiology
Freeware tools
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
Handling, storage, packaging, transport
Humans
Life Sciences
Meat Products - microbiology
Microbial quantitative risk assessment
Models, Biological
Monte Carlo Method
Other
Risk Assessment - methods
Risk Assessment - statistics & numerical data
Second-order Monte Carlo simulations
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Quantitative risk assessment has emerged as a valuable tool to enhance the scientific basis of regulatory decisions in the food safety domain. This article introduces the use of two new computing resources (R packages) specifically developed to help risk assessors in their projects. The first package, “fitdistrplus”, gathers tools for choosing and fitting a parametric univariate distribution to a given dataset. The data may be continuous or discrete. Continuous data may be right-, left- or interval-censored as is frequently obtained with analytical methods, with the possibility of various censoring thresholds within the dataset. Bootstrap procedures then allow the assessor to evaluate and model the uncertainty around the parameters and to transfer this information into a quantitative risk assessment model. The second package, “mc2d”, helps to build and study two dimensional (or second-order) Monte-Carlo simulations in which the estimation of variability and uncertainty in the risk estimates is separated. This package easily allows the transfer of separated variability and uncertainty along a chain of conditional mathematical and probabilistic models. The usefulness of these packages is illustrated through a risk assessment of hemolytic and uremic syndrome in children linked to the presence of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in ground beef. These R packages are freely available at the Comprehensive R Archive Network (cran.r-project.org).
ISSN:0168-1605
1879-3460
DOI:10.1016/j.ijfoodmicro.2010.07.011