Related papers: Boosting test-efficiency by pooled testing strateg…
Understanding the number of individuals who have been infected with the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and the extent to which social distancing policies have been effective at limiting its spread, are critical for effective policy going…
The problem of Group Testing is to identify defective items out of a set of objects by means of pool queries of the form "Does the pool contain at least a defective?". The aim is of course to perform detection with the fewest possible…
In nested simulation literature, a common assumption is that the experimenter can choose the number of outer scenarios to sample. This paper considers the case when the experimenter is given a fixed set of outer scenarios from an external…
Network scientists have proposed that infectious diseases involving person-to-person transmission may be effectively halted by targeting interventions at a minority of highly connected individuals. Can this strategy be effective in…
This is a pedagogical paper on estimating the number of people that can be infected by one infectious person during an epidemic outbreak, known as the reproduction number. Knowing the number is crucial for developing policy responses. There…
Testing is a crucial control mechanism in the beginning phase of an epidemic when the vaccines are not yet available. It enables the public health authority to detect and isolate the infected cases from the population, thereby limiting the…
We describe efficient methods for screening clone libraries, based on pooling schemes which we call ``random $k$-sets designs''. In these designs, the pools in which any clone occurs are equally likely to be any possible selection of $k$…
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a rapidly emerging respiratory disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Due to the rapid human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2, many healthcare systems…
Hybrid studies allow investigators to simultaneously study an intervention effectiveness outcome and an implementation research outcome. In particular, type 2 hybrid studies support research that places equal importance on both outcomes…
This paper develops an individual-based stochastic network SIR model for the empirical analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic. It derives moment conditions for the number of infected and active cases for single as well as multigroup epidemic…
Although previous infection and vaccination provide protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection, both reinfection and breakthrough infection are possible events whose occurrence would increase with time after first exposure to the antigen and…
As Europe is experiencing a second violent CoVid-19 storm, with the PCR-based testing system deteriorating due to the high volumes of people to be tested daily, there is a general reconsideration of the mathematical theories at the basis of…
The practice of pooling several individual test statistics to form aggregate tests is common in many statistical application where individual tests may be underpowered. While selection by aggregate tests can serve to increase power, the…
The problem of population recovery refers to estimating a distribution based on incomplete or corrupted samples. Consider a random poll of sample size $n$ conducted on a population of individuals, where each pollee is asked to answer $d$…
The COVID-19 pandemic has plagued the world for months. The U.S. has taken measures to counter it. On a daily basis, newly confirmed cases have been reported. In the early days, these numbers showed an increasing trend. Recently, the…
An important question in constructing Cross Validation (CV) estimators of the generalization error is whether rules can be established that allow "optimal" selection of the size of the training set, for fixed sample size $n$. We define the…
Based on the well known SIR model, this paper develops a model for predicting the number of necessary testings of asymptomatic persons in order to push Reff below 1, thus suppressing an outbreak. The model considers R0, time for obtaining a…
Participant level meta-analysis across multiple studies increases the sample size for pooled analyses, thereby improving precision in effect estimates and enabling subgroup analyses. For analyses involving biomarker measurements as an…
The determination of the infection fatality rate (IFR) for the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is a key aim for many of the field studies that are currently being undertaken in response to the pandemic. The IFR together with the basic…
Detection of defective members of large populations has been widely studied in the statistics community under the name "group testing", a problem which dates back to World War II when it was suggested for syphilis screening. There the main…