Bayesian Modeling of Dynamic Behavioral Change During an Epidemic

Autor: Ward, Caitlin, Deardon, Rob, Schmidt, Alexandra M.
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1016/j.idm.2023.08.002
Popis: For many infectious disease outbreaks, the at-risk population changes their behavior in response to the outbreak severity, causing the transmission dynamics to change in real-time. Behavioral change is often ignored in epidemic modeling efforts, making these models less useful than they could be. We address this by introducing a novel class of data-driven epidemic models which characterize and accurately estimate behavioral change. Our proposed model allows time-varying transmission to be captured by the level of "alarm" in the population, with alarm specified as a function of the past epidemic trajectory. We investigate the estimability of the population alarm across a wide range of scenarios, applying both parametric functions and non-parametric functions using splines and Gaussian processes. The model is set in the data-augmented Bayesian framework to allow estimation on partially observed epidemic data. The benefit and utility of the proposed approach is illustrated through applications to data from real epidemics.
Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures
Databáze: arXiv