Related papers: Contact patterns among high school students
Given their importance in shaping social networks and determining how information or diseases propagate in a population, human interactions are the subject of many data collection efforts. To this aim, different methods are commonly used,…
Little quantitative information is available on the mixing patterns of children in school environments. Describing and understanding contacts between children at school would help quantify the transmission opportunities of respiratory…
In this paper, we provide a statistical analysis of high-resolution contact pattern data within primary and secondary schools as collected by the SocioPatterns collaboration. Students are graphically represented as nodes in a temporally…
Many epidemic models approximate social contact behavior by assuming random mixing within mixing groups (e.g., homes, schools and workplaces). The effect of more realistic social network structure on estimates of epidemic parameters is an…
The analysis of social networks, in particular those describing face-to-face interactions between individuals, is complex due to the intertwining of the topological and temporal aspects. We revisit them both, using public data recorded by…
Since a significant amount of disease transmission occurs through human-to-human or social contact, understanding who interacts with whom in time and space is essential for disease transmission modeling, prediction, and assessment of…
Mathematical and computational modeling approaches are increasingly used as quantitative tools in the analysis and forecasting of infectious disease epidemics. The growing need for realism in addressing complex public health questions is…
Social contact studies, investigating social contact patterns in a population sample, have been an important contribution for epidemic models to better fit real life epidemics. A contact matrix $M$, having the \emph{mean} number of contacts…
Contact patterns in populations fundamentally influence the spread of infectious diseases. Current mathematical methods for epidemiological forecasting on networks largely assume that contacts between individuals are fixed, at least for the…
Contact (or mixing, or more generally connectivity) matrices are a fundamental component of modelling and inference for infectious disease epidemiology. Their structure and parametrisation directly accounts for the frequency of interactions…
Humans interact through numerous channels to build and maintain social connections: they meet face-to-face, initiate phone calls or send text messages, and interact via social media. Although it is known that the network of physical…
Contact matrices are a commonly adopted data representation, used to develop compartmental models for epidemic spreading, accounting for the contact heterogeneities across age groups. Their estimation, however, is generally time and effort…
The modeling of the spreading of communicable diseases has experienced significant advances in the last two decades or so. This has been possible due to the proliferation of data and the development of new methods to gather, mine and…
The integration of empirical data in computational frameworks to model the spread of infectious diseases poses challenges that are becoming pressing with the increasing availability of high-resolution information on human mobility and…
Recent developments in sensing technologies have enabled us to examine the nature of human social behavior in greater detail. By applying an information theoretic method to the spatiotemporal data of cell-phone locations, [C. Song et al.…
To understand the contact patterns of a population -- who is in contact with whom, and when the contacts happen -- is crucial for modeling outbreaks of infectious disease. Traditional theoretical epidemiology assumes that any individual can…
The spread of infectious diseases crucially depends on the pattern of contacts among individuals. Knowledge of these patterns is thus essential to inform models and computational efforts. Few empirical studies are however available that…
Social contact patterns are key drivers of infectious disease transmission. During the COVID-19 pandemic, differences between pre-COVID and COVID-era contact rates were widely attributed to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as…
Face-to-face social contacts are potentially important transmission routes for acute respiratory infections, and understanding the contact network can improve our ability to predict, contain, and control epidemics. Although workplaces are…
Contact matrices have become a key ingredient of modern epidemic models. They account for the stratification of contacts for the age of individuals and, in some cases, the context of their interactions. However, age and context are not the…