Related papers: Contemporary statistical inference for infectious …
To improve the efficiency of Monte Carlo estimation, practitioners are turning to biased Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures that trade off asymptotic exactness for computational speed. The reasoning is sound: a reduction in variance due to…
Inferring how an epidemic will progress and what actions to take when presented with limited information is of critical importance for epidemiologists and health professionals. In real world settings, epidemiology data can be scarce or…
Stochastic epidemic models provide an interpretable probabilistic description of the spread of a disease through a population. Yet, fitting these models to partially observed data is a notoriously difficult task due to intractability of the…
A number of algorithms have been developed to solve probabilistic inference problems on belief networks. These algorithms can be divided into two main groups: exact techniques which exploit the conditional independence revealed when the…
We introduce inference trees (ITs), a new class of inference methods that build on ideas from Monte Carlo tree search to perform adaptive sampling in a manner that balances exploration with exploitation, ensures consistency, and alleviates…
Structured additive distributional regression models offer a versatile framework for estimating complete conditional distributions by relating all parameters of a parametric distribution to covariates. Although these models efficiently…
In this paper, we develop a method to estimate the infection-rate of a disease, over a region, as a field that varies in space and time. To do so, we use time-series of case-counts of symptomatic patients as observed in the areal units that…
We develop a Bayesian non-parametric framework based on multi-task Gaussian processes, appropriate for temporal shrinkage. We focus on a particular class of dynamic hierarchical models to obtain evidence-based knowledge of infectious…
Increasingly complex applications involve large datasets in combination with non-linear and high dimensional mathematical models. In this context, statistical inference is a challenging issue that calls for pragmatic approaches that take…
Lifetime data with spatial correlations are often collected for analysis in modern engineering, clinical, and medical applications. For such spatial lifetime data, statistical models usually account for the spatial dependence through…
We define generalized innovations associated with generalized error models having arbitrary distributions, that is, distributions that can be mixtures of continuous and discrete distributions. These models include stochastic volatility…
We study the problems of estimating the past and future evolutions of two diffusion processes that spread concurrently on a network. Specifically, given a known network $G=(V, \overrightarrow{E})$ and a (possibly noisy) snapshot…
We propose a mathematical model based on probability theory to optimize COVID-19 testing by a multi-step batch testing approach with variable batch sizes. This model and simulation tool dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of…
Bayesian hierarchical linear models provide a natural framework to analyze nested and clustered data. Classical estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo produces well calibrated posterior distributions but becomes computationally expensive…
Simulation-based methods for statistical inference have evolved dramatically over the past 50 years, keeping pace with technological advancements. The field is undergoing a new revolution as it embraces the representational capacity of…
Discrete choice models are commonly used by applied statisticians in numerous fields, such as marketing, economics, finance, and operations research. When agents in discrete choice models are assumed to have differing preferences, exact…
Discrete and Continuous Dynamics is the first in a series of articles on Network Models for Epidemiology. This project began in the Fall quarter of 2014 in my continuous modeling course. Since then, it has taken off and turned into a series…
In Part 1, we introduced a stochastic model of an infectious disease, based on the BDI (birth and death with immigration) process. We showed that random processes defined by this model can capture the essence of the stochastic, often…
Epidemiologists use a variety of statistical algorithms for the early detection of outbreaks. The practical usefulness of such methods highly depends on the trade-off between the detection rate of outbreaks and the chances of raising a…
This paper investigates the use of stratified sampling as a variance reduction technique for approximating integrals over large dimensional spaces. The accuracy of this method critically depends on the choice of the space partition, the…