Related papers: Estimating HIV Cross-sectional Incidence Using Rec…
Countries officially record the number of COVID-19 cases based on medical tests of a subset of the population with unknown participation bias. For prevalence estimation, the official information is typically discarded and, instead, small…
Multi-parameter evidence synthesis (MPES) is receiving growing attention from the epidemiological community as a coherent and flexible analytical framework to accommodate a disparate body of evidence available to inform disease incidence…
Causal inference methods can be applied to estimate the effect of a point exposure or treatment on an outcome of interest using data from observational studies. For example, in the Women's Interagency HIV Study, it is of interest to…
We present a comprehensive statistical methodological framework for estimating contextual exposure to HIV that includes local (grid-cell level) estimation of HIV prevalence and human activity space estimation based on GPS data. The…
HIV pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) has become essential for global HIV control, but its implementation coincides with rising bacterial STI rates among men who have sex with men (MSM). While risk-compensation behavioral changes like reduced…
We consider time to treatment initiation. This can commonly occur in preventive medicine, such as disease screening and vaccination; it can also occur with non-fatal health conditions such as HIV infection without the onset of AIDS. While…
Researchers in many scientific fields make inferences from individuals to larger groups. For many groups however, there is no list of members from which to take a random sample. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a relatively new sampling…
We introduce a new version of forward stepwise regression. Our modification finds solutions to regression problems where the selected predictors appear in a structured pattern, with respect to a predefined distance measure over the…
The government's effort to alleviate HIV stigma has been justified by the suppression effect of stigma on the HIV testing rate. Nevertheless, the deterrence effect of stigma on undesirable sexual behaviours has long been overlooked. This…
Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a widely used method for sampling from hard-to-reach human populations, especially groups most at-risk for HIV/AIDS. Data are collected through a peer-referral process in which current sample members…
In settings where interference between units is possible, we define the prevalence of indirect effects to be the number of units who are affected by the treatment of others. This quantity does not fully identify an indirect effect, but may…
Understanding historical trends in the epidemic of HIV is important for assessing current and projecting future trends in prevalence, incidence and mortality and for evaluating the impact and cost-effectiveness of control measures. In…
Estimating prevalence, the fraction of a population with a certain medical condition, is fundamental to epidemiology. Traditional methods rely on classification of test samples taken at random from a population. Such approaches to…
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has developed the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP) for making national estimates and short-term projections of HIV prevalence based on observed prevalence trends at antenatal…
As the global HIV pandemic enters its fourth decade, increasing numbers of surveillance sites have been established which allows countries to look into the epidemics at a finer scale, e.g. at sub-national levels. Currently, the epidemic…
Accurate estimation of disease prevalence is essential for guiding public health strategies. Imperfect diagnostic tests can cause misclassification errors-false positives (FP) and false negatives (FN)-that may skew estimates if unaddressed.…
Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an effective intervention for preventing HIV transmission, but high cost and uneven uptake raise challenges for resource allocation. While spillover effects, wherein PrEP use in one group reduces…
We present a new joint longitudinal and survival model aimed at estimating the association between the risk of an event and the change in and history of a biomarker that is repeatedly measured over time. We use cubic B-splines models for…
While probabilistic projection methods for projecting life expectancy exist, few account for covariates related to life expectancy. Generalized HIV/AIDS epidemics have a large, immediate negative impact on the life expectancy in a country,…
Representative risk estimation is fundamental to clinical decision-making. However, risks are often estimated from non-representative epidemiologic studies, which usually underrepresent minorities. "Model-based" methods use population…