Related papers: The Case for Controls: Identifying outbreak risk f…
The attributable risk, often called the population attributable risk, is in many epidemiological contexts a more relevant measure of exposure-disease association than the excess risk, relative risk, or odds ratio. When estimating…
This paper develops an agent-based disease spread model on a contact network in an effort to guide efforts at surveillance testing in small to moderate facilities such as nursing homes and meat-packing plants. The model employs Monte Carlo…
Causality has been the issue of philosophic debate since Hippocrates. It is used in formal verification and testing, e.g., to explain counterexamples or construct fault trees. Recent work defines actual causation in terms of Pearl's…
Optimal control of interdependent epidemics spreading over complex networks is a critical issue. We first establish a framework to capture the coupling between two epidemics, and then analyze the system's equilibrium states by categorizing…
Detecting anomalies in large sets of observations is crucial in various applications, such as epidemiological studies, gene expression studies, and systems monitoring. We consider settings where the units of interest result in multiple…
This paper discusses the fundamental principles of causal inference - the area of statistics that estimates the effect of specific occurrences, treatments, interventions, and exposures on a given outcome from experimental and observational…
Epidemiological contact network models have emerged as an important tool in understanding and predicting the spread of infectious disease, due to their capacity to engage individual heterogeneity that may underlie essential dynamics of a…
The fundamental models of epidemiology describe the progression of an infectious disease through a population using compartmentalized differential equations, but do not incorporate population-level heterogeneity in infection susceptibility.…
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…
In this paper we first introduce the general stochastic epidemic model for the spread of infectious diseases. Then we give methods for inferring model parameters such as the basic reproduction number $R_0$ and vaccination coverage $v_c$…
Contact tracing is one of the most important control measures deployed during epidemics. Relying on the identification of contacts of known infected individuals, it necessitates a network perspective. Although pairwise models have been used…
Incidence vs Cumulative Cases (ICC) curves are introduced and shown to provide a simple framework for parameter identification in the case of the most elementary epidemiological model, consisting of susceptible, infected, and removed…
Containment of epidemic outbreaks entails great societal and economic costs. Cost-effective containment strategies rely on efficiently identifying infected individuals, making the best possible use of the available testing resources.…
Simple ideas, endowed from the mathematical theory of control, are used in order to analyze in general grounds the human immune system. The general principles are minimization of the pathogen load and economy of resources. They should…
Epidemiological compartmental models are useful for understanding infectious disease propagation and directing public health policy decisions. Calibration of these models is an important step in offering accurate forecasts of disease…
In recent years, epidemic policy-making models are increasingly being used to provide reference for governors on prevention and control policies against catastrophic epidemics such as SARS, H1N1 and COVID-19. Existing studies are currently…
Higher educational institutions constantly look for ways to meet students' needs and support them through graduation. Recent work in the field of learning analytics have developed methods for grade prediction and course recommendations.…
Compartmental models have long served as important tools in mathematical epidemiology, with their usefulness highlighted by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. However, most of the classical models fail to account for certain features of this…
A key problem in modelling the evolution dynamics of infectious diseases is the mathematical representation of the mechanism of transmission of the contagion. Models with a finite number of subpopulations can be described via systems of…
Understanding age-group dynamics of infectious diseases is a fundamental issue for both scientific study and policymaking. Age-structure epidemic models were developed in order to study and improve our understanding of these dynamics. By…