Formal Concept Analysis of Rodent Carriers of Zoonotic Disease

Abstract

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.