Related papers: Eigenvector-Based Sensitivity Analysis of Contact …
Understanding the role of different age groups in disease transmission is crucial for designing effective intervention strategies. A key parameter in age-structured epidemic models is the contact matrix, which defines the interaction…
Mathematical and computational modeling approaches are increasingly used as quantitative tools in the analysis and forecasting of infectious disease epidemics. The growing need for realism in addressing complex public health questions is…
Capturing the structured mixing within a population is key to the reliable projection of infectious disease dynamics and hence informed control. Both heterogeneity in the number of contacts and age-structured mixing have been repeatedly…
Acute infectious diseases are transmitted over networks of social contacts. Epidemic models are used to predict the spread of emergent pathogens and compare intervention strategies. Many of these models assume equal probability of contact…
Capturing the structure of a population and characterising contacts within the population are key to reliable projections of infectious disease. Two main elements of population structure -- contact heterogeneity and age -- have been…
Individuals socio-demographic and economic characteristics crucially shape the spread of an epidemic by largely determining the exposure level to the virus and the severity of the disease for those who got infected. While the complex…
The contact structure between hosts has a critical influence on disease spread. However, most networkbased models used in epidemiology tend to ignore heterogeneity in the weighting of contacts. This assumption is known to be at odds with…
In this article, we investigate the importance of demographic and contact patterns in determining the spread of COVID-19 and to the effectiveness of social distancing policies. We investigate these questions proposing an augmented…
Contact matrices have become a key ingredient of modern epidemic models. They account for the stratification of contacts for the age of individuals and, in some cases, the context of their interactions. However, age and context are not the…
The unprecedented behavioural responses of societies have been evidently shaping the COVID-19 pandemic, yet it is a significant challenge to accurately monitor the continuously changing social mixing patterns in real-time. Contact matrices,…
Households play a crucial role in the propagation of infectious diseases due to the frequent and prolonged interactions that typically occur between their members. Recent studies have emphasized the need to include socioeconomic variables…
The modeling of the spreading of communicable diseases has experienced significant advances in the last two decades or so. This has been possible due to the proliferation of data and the development of new methods to gather, mine and…
Social contact patterns are a key input to many infectious disease models. Contact surveys, where participants are asked to provide information on their recent close and casual contacts with others, are one of the standard methods to…
Human to human transmissible infectious diseases spread in a population using human interactions as its transmission vector. The early stages of such an outbreak can be modeled by a graph whose edges encode these interactions between…
The dynamics of contact networks and epidemics of infectious diseases often occur on comparable time scales. Ignoring one of these time scales may provide an incomplete understanding of the population dynamics of the infection process. We…
Infectious diseases that incorporate pre-symptomatic transmission are challenging to monitor, model, predict and contain. We address this scenario by studying a variant of a stochastic susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered model on…
Background: Human-to-human transmission of pathogens fundamentally depends on interactions among infectious and susceptible individuals, yet traditional population-scale models often overlook the stochastic, behaviour-driven, and highly…
We investigate the use of transfer entropy (TE) as a proxy to detect the contact patterns of the population in epidemic processes. We first apply the measure to a classical age-stratified SIR model and observe that the recovered patterns…
The spread of infectious diseases crucially depends on the pattern of contacts among individuals. Knowledge of these patterns is thus essential to inform models and computational efforts. Few empirical studies are however available that…
Contact (or mixing, or more generally connectivity) matrices are a fundamental component of modelling and inference for infectious disease epidemiology. Their structure and parametrisation directly accounts for the frequency of interactions…