Related papers: Risk ratios for contagious outcomes
Generalization methods offer a powerful solution to one of the key drawbacks of randomized controlled trials (RCTs): their limited representativeness. By enabling the transport of treatment effect estimates to target populations subject to…
When a new infectious disease (or a new strain of an existing one) emerges, as in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, different types of mobility restrictions are considered to slow down or mitigate the spread of the disease. The measures to be…
We present a model of contagion that unifies and generalizes existing models of the spread of social influences and micro-organismal infections. Our model incorporates individual memory of exposure to a contagious entity (e.g., a rumor or…
This paper applies risk analysis to medical problems, through the properties of nonlinear responses (convex or concave). It shows 1) necessary relations between the nonlinearity of dose-response and the statistical properties of the…
This paper introduces semiparametric relative-risk regression models for infectious disease data based on contact intervals, where the contact interval from person i to person j is the time between the onset of infectiousness in i and…
The Cox regression model and its associated hazard ratio (HR) are frequently used for summarizing the effect of treatments on time to event outcomes. However, the HR's interpretation strongly depends on the assumed underlying survival…
Infectious diseases, either emerging or long-lasting, place numerous people at risk and bring heavy public health burdens worldwide. In the process against infectious diseases, predicting the epidemic risk by modeling the disease…
Epidemiologists and applied statisticians often believe that relative effect measures conditional on covariates, such as risk ratios and mean ratios, are ``transportable'' across populations. Here, we examine the identification of causal…
There is a rich history of models for the interaction of a biological contagion like influenza with the spread of related information such as an influenza vaccination campaign. Recent work on the spread of interacting contagions on networks…
Interest in targeted disease prevention has stimulated development of models that assign risks to individuals, using their personal covariates. We need to evaluate these models, and to quantify the gains achieved by expanding a model with…
Models for epidemic spread typically account for variable risk factors but do not account for the correlation between behavior and risk. Here we extend these models to account for such correlations. We find that a positive correlation…
Why are the epidemic patterns of COVID-19 so different among different cities or countries which are similar in their populations, medical infrastructures, and people's behavior? Why are forecasts or predictions made by so-called experts…
We present and analyze a mathematical model to study the feedback between behavior and epidemic spread in a population that is actively assessing and reacting to risk of infection. In our model, a population dynamically forms an opinion…
Instrumental variable methods are widely used in medical and social science research to draw causal conclusions when the treatment and outcome are confounded by unmeasured confounding variables. One important feature of such studies is that…
Epidemic disease spreading is conventionally often modelled and analyzed by means of rate and diffusion equations, following the paradigms of well-controlled chemical reactions and diffusive dynamics in a test tube. Yet, serious worries…
Individual contributions to the spread of an epidemic vary widely due to an individual's location in a social network and their intrinsic ability to spread or contract diseases. While the effect of heterogeneous population structure and…
The current survey paper concerns stochastic mathematical models for the spread of infectious diseases. It starts with the simplest setting of a homogeneous population in which a transmittable disease spreads during a short outbreak.…
In this work, we aim to understand the influence of the heterogeneity of infection rates on the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) epidemic spreading. Employing the classic SIS model as the benchmark, we study the influence of the…
We propose a compartmental model for epidemiology wherein the population is split into groups with either comply or refuse to comply with protocols designed to slow the spread of a disease. Parallel to the disease spread, we assume that…
Objective: Recently Doi et al. argued that risk ratios should be replaced with odds ratios in clinical research. We disagreed, and empirically documented the lack of portability of odds ratios, while Doi et al. defended their position. In…