A classical hypothesis test for assessing the homogeneity of disease transmission in stochastic epidemic models

Aristotelous, Georgios; Kypraios, Theodore; O'neill, Philip D

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of assessing the homogeneity of the disease transmission process in stochastic epidemic models in populations that are partitioned into social groups. We develop a classical hypothesis test for completed epidemics which assesses whether or not there is significant within-group transmission during an outbreak. The test is based on time-ordered group labels of individuals. The null hypothesis is that of homogeneity of disease transmission among individuals, a hypothesis under which the discrete random vector of groups labels has a known sampling distribution that is independent of any model parameters. The test exhibits excellent performance when applied to various scenarios of simulated data and is also illustrated using two real-life epidemic data sets. We develop some asymptotic theory including a central limit theorem. The test is practically very appealing, being computationally cheap and straightforward to implement, as well as being applicable to a wide range of real-life outbreak settings and to related problems in other fields.

Citation

Aristotelous, G., Kypraios, T., & O'neill, P. D. (in press). A classical hypothesis test for assessing the homogeneity of disease transmission in stochastic epidemic models. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics,

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 21, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jun 21, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 21, 2024
• Journal: Scandinavian Journal of Statistics
• Print ISSN: 0303-6898
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-9469
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: epidemic model; hypothesis test; infectious disease data
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/36303756