Related papers: Will the announced influenza pandemic really happe…
Seasonal influenza is a significant public health concern in the United States and globally. While influenza vaccines are the single most effective intervention to reduce influenza morbidity and mortality, there is considerable debate…
Public debates driven by incomplete scientific data where nobody can claim absolute certainty, due to current state of scientific knowledge, are studied. The cases of evolution theory, global warming and H1N1 pandemic influenza are…
This study presents a family of stochastic models for the dynamics of influenza in a closed human population. We consider treatment for the disease in the form of vaccination, and incorporate the periods of effectiveness of the vaccine and…
Uncertainty can be classified as either aleatoric (intrinsic randomness) or epistemic (imperfect knowledge of parameters). The majority of frameworks assessing infectious disease risk consider only epistemic uncertainty. We only ever…
This study estimates the overall effect of two influenza vaccination programs consecutively administered in a cluster-randomized trial in western Senegal over the course of two influenza seasons from 2009-2011. We apply cutting-edge…
This paper presents a predictive model for Influenza-Like-Illness, based on Twitter traffic. We gather data from Twitter based on a set of keywords used in the Influenza wikipedia page, and perform feature selection over all words used in 3…
A simple, but ``classical``, stochastic model for epidemic spread in a finite, but large, population is studied. The progress of the epidemic can be divided into three different phases that requires different tools to analyse. Initially the…
Predictability of undesired events is a question of great interest in many scientific disciplines including seismology, economy, and epidemiology. Here, we focus on the predictability of invasion of a broad class of epidemics caused by…
Count data with excessive zeros are often encountered when modelling infectious disease occurrence. The degree of zero inflation can vary over time due to non-epidemic periods as well as by age group or region. The existing endemic-epidemic…
The impact of climate conditions on influenza epidemiology has mostly been studied by addressing a singular aspect of transmission and a climate variable correlating to it. As climate change unfolds at an unprecedented rate, we urgently…
A model of the spread of viruses in selected city and in a network of cities is considered, taking into account the delay caused by the long incubation period of the virus. The effect of delay effects is shown in comparison with pandemics…
We define and analyze an inductive reasoning game of voluntary yearly vaccination in order to establish whether or not a population of individuals acting in their own self-interest would be able to prevent influenza epidemics. We find that…
Flu circulates all over the world. The worldwide infection places a substantial burden on people's health every year. Regardless of the characteristic of the worldwide circulation of flu, most previous studies focused on regional prediction…
Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…
We analyze over 500 million Twitter messages from an eight month period and find that tracking a small number of flu-related keywords allows us to forecast future influenza rates with high accuracy, obtaining a 95% correlation with national…
Inspired by Minority Games, we constructed a novel individual-level game of adaptive decision-making based on the dilemma of deciding whether to participate in voluntary influenza vaccination programs. The proportion of the population…
We introduce a simple multiplicative model to describe the temporal behavior and the ultimate outcome of an epidemic. Our model accounts, in a minimalist way, for the competing influences of imposing public-health restrictions when the…
Early detection and modeling of a contagious epidemic can provide important guidance about quelling the contagion, controlling its spread, or the effective design of countermeasures. A topic of recent interest has been to design social…
Over the last ten years, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has organized an annual influenza forecasting challenge with the motivation that accurate probabilistic forecasts could improve situational awareness and yield…
Mathematical models of epidemic dynamics offer significant insight into predicting and controlling infectious diseases. The dynamics of a disease model generally follow a susceptible, infected, and recovered (SIR) model, with some standard…