Related papers: Will the announced influenza pandemic really happe…
Halting a computer or biological virus outbreak requires a detailed understanding of the timing of the interactions between susceptible and infected individuals. While current spreading models assume that users interact uniformly in time,…
We predict vaccine efficacy with a measure of antigenic distance between influenza A(H3N2) and candidate vaccine viruses based on amino acid substitutions in the dominant epitopes. In 2016-2017, our model predicts 19% efficacy compared to…
In an article written five years ago [arXiv:0809.0522], we described a method for predicting which scientific papers will be highly cited in the future, even if they are currently not highly cited. Applying the method to real citation data…
Epidemic outbreaks of new pathogens, or known pathogens in new populations, cause a great deal of fear because they are hard to predict. For theoretical models of disease spreading, on the other hand, quantities characterizing the outbreak…
We consider the general branching random walk under minimal assumptions, which in particular guarantee that the empirical particle distribution admits an almost sure central limit theorem. For such a process, we study the large time decay…
We consider the problem of interval estimation of the odds ratio. An asymptotic confidence interval is widely applied in medical research. Unfortunately that confidence interval has a poor coverage probability: it is significantly smaller…
Understanding age-group dynamics of infectious diseases is a fundamental issue for both scientific study and policymaking. Age-structure epidemic models were developed in order to study and improve our understanding of these dynamics. By…
Mobile phones provide a powerful sensing platform that researchers may adopt to understand proximity interactions among people and the diffusion, through these interactions, of diseases, behaviors, and opinions. However, it remains a…
In many complex systems studied in statistical physics, inter-arrival times between events such as solar flares, trades and neuron voltages follow a heavy-tailed distribution. The set of event times is fractal-like, being dense in some time…
Common respiratory viruses cause seasonal epidemics in sequential patterns. The underlying mechanisms for this pattern have been debated for some time. For influenza, contenders include temperature, humidity, and vitamin D levels. While…
How often can we expect a Major League Baseball team to score at least 20 runs in a single game? Considered a rare event in baseball, the outcome of scoring at least 20 runs in a game has occurred 224 times during regular season games since…
Our chances to halt epidemic outbreaks rely on how accurately we represent the population structure underlying the disease spread. When analyzing global epidemics this force us to consider metapopulation models taking into account intra-…
Epidemics of infectious diseases are an important threat to public health and global economies. Yet, the development of prevention strategies remains a challenging process, as epidemics are non-linear and complex processes. For this reason,…
Transmission rates are key in understanding the spread of infectious diseases. Using the framework of compartmental models, we introduce a simple method that enables us to reconstruct time series of transmission rates directly from…
We propose an SIR epidemic model coupled with opinion dynamics to study an epidemic and opinions spreading in a network of communities. Our model couples networked SIR epidemic dynamics with opinions towards the severity of the epidemic,…
The decision of whether or not to vaccinate is a complex one. It involves the contribution both to a social good -- herd immunity -- and to one's own well being. It is informed by social influence, personal experience, education, and mass…
The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has instigated unprecedented changes in many countries around the globe, putting a significant burden on the health sectors, affecting the macro economic conditions, and altering social interactions…
We analytically address disease outbreaks in large, random networks with heterogeneous infectivity and susceptibility. The transmissibility $T_{uv}$ (the probability that infection of $u$ causes infection of $v$) depends on the infectivity…
No, they can't. Epidemic spread is characterized by exponentially growing dynamics, which are intrinsically unpredictable. The time at which the growth in the number of infected individuals halts and starts decreasing cannot be calculated…
This article describes a new method for estimating weekly incidence (new onset) of symptoms consistent with Influenza and COVID-19, using data from the Flutracking survey. The method mitigates some of the known self-selection and…