From surveillance maturity to analytical readiness: an estimand-first framework for real-time outbreak analysis under imperfect data

<jats:p>Background: Real-time outbreak analyses are often requested before surveillance systems have stabilised or epidemics have generated enough information for the desired inference. Existing approaches address surveillance quality, forecasting, estimands and identifiability separately, but do not provide a common rule for deciding which analytical product is supportable at a particular data vintage. We developed an estimand-first framework for analytical readiness. Methods: The framework distinguishes surveillance maturity (S), epidemic-process informativeness (E) and estimand-specific analytical readiness, defined as whether the available data vintage, observation process, method and decision-matched validation support a specified inference for a specified decision. We stress-tested four implications using longitudinal data from the 2018-2020 Ebola response in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), archived geographic forecasts, independent forecasting data from Western Area, Sierra Leone, and a targeted mortality-identifiability experiment. Results: During a documented DRC surveillance disruption and recovery, seven-day persistence forecasts had all-health-zone absolute errors of 1, 3, 18 and 4 cases across pre-shock, acute-shock, early-recovery and recovery origins; the largest error occurred during early recovery. Four-week reported-case trend multipliers changed from 0.67 and 0.73 to 1.12 and 1.29, while the final fit was strongly overdispersed (Pearson dispersion 7.65), demonstrating asynchronous readiness across estimands. Archived geographic forecasts improved a Top-3 allocation decision over cumulative burden at only one origin despite consistently lower Brier scores for one specification. In Western Area, persistence forecast mean absolute error increased from 39.1 cases at one week to 82.3 at four weeks, and a history-to-horizon ratio did not define a universal threshold. An observed reported case-fatality ratio of 0.40 was compatible with constructed latent fatality values from 0.10 to 0.80; increasing the reported denominator narrowed sampling uncertainty without reducing structural uncertainty. Conclusions: Analytical readiness is task- and vintage-specific rather than a property of a dataset. More data, model convergence or narrow intervals cannot substitute for estimand definition, observation-process awareness, decision-matched validation and explicit identification analysis. Keywords: outbreak analytics; surveillance maturity; analytical readiness; estimand; identifiability; forecasting; Ebola; reporting process; decision-matched validation</jats:p>