Related papers: A Bayesian framework for estimating vaccine effica…
Phylogenetic comparative methods correct for shared evolutionary history among a set of non-independent organisms by modeling sample traits as arising from a diffusion process along on the branches of a possibly unknown history. To…
When assessing the causal effect of a binary exposure using observational data, confounder imbalance across exposure arms must be addressed. Matching methods, including propensity score-based matching, can be used to deconfound the causal…
The transmission dynamics of an epidemic are rarely homogeneous. Super-spreading events and super-spreading individuals are two types of heterogeneous transmissibility. Inference of super-spreading is commonly carried out on secondary case…
Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…
Collected data, which is used for analysis or prediction tasks, often have a hierarchical structure, for example, data from various people performing the same task. Modeling the data's structure can improve the reliability of the derived…
The acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic has made apparent the need for decision support based upon accurate epidemic modeling. This process is substantially hampered by under-reporting of cases and related data incompleteness issues. In…
Contact-tracing is an essential tool in order to mitigate the impact of pandemic such as the COVID-19. In order to achieve efficient and scalable contact-tracing in real time, digital devices can play an important role. While a lot of…
The use of Bayesian information criterion (BIC) in the model selection procedure is under the assumption that the observations are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). However, in practice, we do not always have i.i.d. samples.…
This article is motivated by the problem of studying the joint effect of different chemical exposures on human health outcomes. This is essentially a nonparametric regression problem, with interest being focused not on a black box for…
Background: The Cox model and its extensions assuming proportional hazards is widely used to estimate vaccine efficacy (VE). In the typical situation that VE wanes over time, the VE estimates are not only sensitive to study duration and…
When modelling HIV epidemics, it is important to incorporate set-point viral load and its heritability. As set-point viral load distributions can differ significantly amongst epidemics, it is imperative to account for the observed local…
The reconstruction of missing information in epidemic spreading on contact networks can be essential in the prevention and containment strategies. The identification and warning of infectious but asymptomatic individuals (i.e., contact…
Factors models are routinely used to analyze high-dimensional data in both single-study and multi-study settings. Bayesian inference for such models relies on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods which scale poorly as the number of…
We consider a continuous-time Markov chain model of SIR disease dynamics with two levels of mixing. For this so-called stochastic households model, we provide two methods for inferring the model parameters---governing within-household…
Performing model selection for coupled hidden Markov models (CHMMs) is highly challenging, owing to the large dimension of the hidden state process. Whilst in principle the hidden state process can be marginalized out via forward filtering,…
The assessment of imaging biomarkers is critical for advancing precision medicine and improving disease characterization. Despite the availability of methods to derive disease heterogeneity metrics in imaging studies, a robust framework for…
The Markovian approach, which assumes exponentially distributed interinfection times, is dominant in epidemic modeling. However, this assumption is unrealistic as an individual's infectiousness depends on its viral load and varies over…
The use of genetic variants as instrumental variables - an approach known as Mendelian randomization - is a popular epidemiological method for estimating the causal effect of an exposure (phenotype, biomarker, risk factor) on a disease or…
Existing methods to estimate the prevalence of chronic hepatitis C (HCV) in New York City (NYC) are limited in scope and fail to assess hard-to-reach subpopulations with highest risk such as injecting drug users (IDUs). To address these…
We address discrete-marks survival analysis, also known as categorical sieve analysis, for a setting of a randomized placebo-controlled treatment intervention to prevent infection by a pathogen to which multiple exposures are possible, with…