Identification of Pre-Emptive Biosecurity Zone Areas for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Based on Machine Learning-Driven Risk Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript submitted by g Jeon et al., proposed a data-driven method to o identify preventive measures against HPAI. The author used the proposed method to evaluate the pre-emptive biosecurity zone areas for HPAI in through analyzing the 105 cases in Jeollanam-do from 2014 to 2023. The result proved that the proposed method was surpass the conventional method in terms of accuracy and the false-positive rate. These results suggested that the method of machine learning-driven risk analysis might have certain application value in selecting farms for monitoring and management of HPAI. This data in the manuscript has certain reference value as a material analysis.

 The manuscript also has certain shortcoming.

The discussion might be not in-depth enough. It is recommended to combine the method and its results with some examples in clinical reports in manuscript. Also, author did not focus on discussing the key factors that have affected the epidemic HPAI in the past decade in the manuscript.

Additionally, Can the proposed method be widely referenced globally?

Also, There are multiple signs with "arXiv preprint" or "arXiv" in references. What do these signs mean? Please standardize and revise the reference format according to the publication requirements.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Paper proposes a data-driven method to generate a aviation infection risk score. The subject is very helpful and very interesting topic. The text is well structured and well written, but it needs some work to be accepted. 

The results and results analysis sections must be completed. The paper needs some conclusions that show the knowledge that can be drawn from this work, and where the limitations are identified, and the work to be done in the future is highlighted.

Introduction:

Lines 47-49: I don’t think such a sentence could be in introduction section; perhaps it could be considered for conclusions or discussion section.

Lines 59-65: Your proposal should be better specified.

You paper does not clearly define your contribution, not it resumes the results obtained.

Materials and methods

Page 3: I don’t like the River ratio parameter, since  the parameter could be specified in a much more useful way. I think as well you need to explain what you want to represent in terms of danger and explain why.

Page 6: Paper should be repaginated, because figures 2,3 and 4 should appear in the order they are referenced in the text.

Line 173: Is not clear what you mean with “In this research, we zero in on the issue of HPAI”.

Results: 

Results are very poor, the section should be repaginated, some text should be added.

Moreover a new evaluation scenario should be considered as well, that has to do with the infection risk for the present /next future periods.

Table 6: A new column should be added to define the number of occurrences per year.

Instead presenting just percentages, paper should go ahead calculating numbers. How many animals were wrongly killed? How many dollars lost in the process?

Discussion: 

The discussion is too short as well.

There is no word on the limitations of the study, nor about the false negatives; and that is a very important since they are a public threat.

Instead of presenting just percentages, paper should go ahead calculating numbers. How many animals were wrongly killed? How many dollars lost in the process?

And in the opposite directions your work should be used in establish the risk of infection for each of the farms. This could be used as an indicator to mitigate infection risks.

Conclusions:

There are no conclusions. Where are the lessons taken from your study? There is no limitations of your work, nor future work lines. Results doesn’t seem to be so solid , so it is desirable to decide different strategies, respecify you rule conditions and find a way to improve the results.

References

The list of references is too short.

The majority of the references have a low quality, since they are preprint versions , that were not peer-reviewed.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I find the paper interesting for the journal's audience, the issues I highlighted were addressed, the problems were mostly resolved, which is why I am in favor of publishing the paper.