Estimating the within-household infection rate in emerging SIR epidemics among a community of households

Ball, Frank; Shaw, Laurence

Abstract

This paper is concerned with estimation of the within household infection rate λL for a susceptible → infective → recovered epidemic among a population of households, from observation of the early, exponentially growing phase of an epidemic. Specifically, it is assumed that an estimate of the exponential growth rate is available from general data on an emerging epidemic and more-detailed, household-level data are available in a sample of households. Estimates of λL obtained using the final size distribution of single-household epidemics are usually biased owing to the emerging nature of the epidemic. A new method, which accounts correctly for the emerging nature of the epidemic, is developed by exploiting the asymptotic theory of supercritical branching processes and proved to yield a strongly consistent estimator of λL as the population and sampled households both tend to infinity in an appropriate fashion. The theory is illustrated by simulations which demonstrate that the new method is feasible for finite populations and numerical studies are used to explore how changes to the parameters governing the spread of an epidemic affect the bias of estimates based on single-household final size distributions.

Citation

Ball, F., & Shaw, L. (in press). Estimating the within-household infection rate in emerging SIR epidemics among a community of households. Journal of Mathematical Biology, 71(6), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00285-015-0872-5

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 9, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Mar 28, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jun 22, 2016
• Journal: Journal of Mathematical Biology
• Print ISSN: 0303-6812
• Electronic ISSN: 1432-1416
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 71
• Issue: 6
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00285-015-0872-5
• Keywords: Household epidemic model, SIR epidemic, Emerging epidemic,; Parameter estimation, Branching process
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/746511
• Publisher URL: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00285-015-0872-5
• Additional Information: The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00285-015-0872-5.
• Contract Date: Jun 21, 2016