Kuang et al. BMC Public Health 2012, 12:418 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/12/418 surveillance data may interfere with the performance evaluation. We set a fixed false alarm rate of 0.05, using simula- tion method to obtain the optimized parameters of dif- ferent daily average counts data, and focused on the evaluation based on sensitivity and timeliness, which could make the comparison more clear. There are several limitations to our study that should be taken into consideration. First, eight types of diseases clustering into three categories may not have a good representation. Second, the simulated outbreaks of eight diseases based on literature have some limitations to re- flect the complexity of real outbreaks. Third, as only using two-year test datasets, we inserted a limited num- ber of simulated outbreaks, which, to some extent, may affect the stability of the evaluation. In addition, due to the large amounts of computation in this study, we only compared three detection algorithms, so the evaluation of other algorithms needed to be further carried out. Conclusions The results of this study show that the MPM has better detection performance than EWMA, CUSUM. It can be considered as a prior algorithm for automatic infectious disease outbreak detection. Infectious disease outbreak detection performance varies with incubation period, baseline counts and outbreak magnitude. This suggests that the actual automatic infectious disease surveillance practice should take epidemic features into consider- ation, and select the appropriate algorithm to improve detection performance. Additional file Additional file 1 The optimized parameters for three algorithms, at an false alarm rate of 5%. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Acknowledgements This research is funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2006BAK01A13, 2008BAI56B02, 2009ZX10004-201). Author details 1Department of Occupational Health, West China School of Public Health, Sichuan University, 17 South Section 3 Renmin Road, Chengdu, Sichuan 610041, China. 2Key Laboratory of Surveillance and Early-warning on Infectious Disease, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), 155 Changbai Road Changping District, Beijing, 102206, China. Authors’ contributions JK and YJL designed the study, JK conducted the study and drafted the manuscript, WZY, DLZ and ZJL participated in the design of the study and involved in revising the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript. Page 8 of 9 Received: 17 January 2012 Accepted: 8 June 2012 Published: 8 June 2012 References 1. Wang LD, Wang Y, Jin SG, Wu ZY, Chin DP, Koplan JP, Wilson ME: Emergence and control of infectious diseases in China. 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