Related papers: Multi-Parameter Estimation of Prevalence (MPEP): A…
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…
Drug overdose deaths, including from opioids, remain a significant public health threat to the United States (US). To abate the harms of opioid misuse, understanding its prevalence at the local level is crucial for stakeholders in…
Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) capture real-time thoughts and behaviors in natural settings, producing rich longitudinal data for statistical and physiological analyses. However, the robustness of these analyses can be compromised…
Traditional epidemic detection algorithms make decisions using only local information. We propose a novel approach that explicitly models spatial information fusion from several metapopulations. Our method also takes into account…
Bayesian predictive inference analyzes a dataset to make predictions about new observations. When a model does not match the data, predictive accuracy suffers. We develop population empirical Bayes (POP-EB), a hierarchical framework that…
Background: Mendelian randomization (MR) has been widely applied to causal inference in medical research. It uses genetic variants as instrumental variables (IVs) to investigate putative causal relationship between an exposure and an…
Epidemic models are invaluable tools to understand and implement strategies to control the spread of infectious diseases, as well as to inform public health policies and resource allocation. However, current modeling approaches have…
We present efforts in the fields of machine learning and time series forecasting to accurately predict counts of future suspected opioid overdoses recorded by Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in the state of Kentucky. Forecasts help…
Opioid addiction has become a global epidemic and a national health crisis in recent years, with the number of opioid overdose fatalities steadily increasing since the 1990s. In contrast to the dynamics of a typical illicit drug or disease…
The problem we consider considers estimating a multivariate longitudinal panel data model whose outcomes can be a combination of discrete and continuous variables. This problem is challenging because the likelihood is usually analytically…
An informative sampling design leads to the selection of units whose inclusion probabilities are correlated with the response variable of interest. Model inference performed on the resulting observed sample will be biased for the population…
The ICH E9(R1) Addendum (International Council for Harmonization 2019) suggests treatment-policy as one of several strategies for addressing intercurrent events such as treatment withdrawal when defining an estimand. This strategy requires…
A stochastic epidemic model is defined in which each individual belongs to a household, a secondary grouping (typically school or workplace) and also the community as a whole. Moreover, infectious contacts take place in these three settings…
The opioid epidemic is a crisis that has plagued the United States (US) for decades. One central issue is inequitable access to treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), which puts certain populations at a higher risk of opioid overdose. We…
Health-policy planning requires evidence on the burden that epidemics place on healthcare systems. Multiple, often dependent, datasets provide a noisy and fragmented signal from the unobserved epidemic process including transmission and…
Doping control is an essential component of anti-doping organizations for protecting clean sports competitions. Since 2009, this mission has been complemented worldwide by the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP), used to monitor athletes'…
The transmission dynamics of an epidemic are rarely homogeneous. Super-spreading events and super-spreading individuals are two types of heterogeneous transmissibility. Inference of super-spreading is commonly carried out on secondary case…
The opioid epidemic remains a major public health challenge in the United States, requiring a multi-pronged intervention approach to mitigate harms to communities. Given the heterogeneity of the epidemic across the country, it is crucial…
Opioid misuse is a national epidemic and a significant drug related threat to the United States. While the scale of the problem is undeniable, estimates of the local prevalence of opioid misuse are lacking, despite their importance to…
We propose a Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) approach to causal inference using observational data consisting of outcome, treatment, and a set of confounders. The conditional distribution of the outcome given treatment and confounders is…