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Bayesian modeling of dynamic behavioral change during an epidemic.

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Ward C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10440573 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Bayesian modeling of dynamic behavioral change during an epidemic.

Ward Caitlin C Deardon Rob R Schmidt Alexandra M AM

Infectious Disease Modelling 20230806 4

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 captur ...[more]

PMID: 37608881

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Bayesian modeling of dynamic behavioral change during an epidemic.

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Bayesian modeling of dynamic behavioral change during an epidemic.

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