Evaluating the adequacy of gravity models as a description of human mobility for epidemic modelling.

ABSTRACT: Gravity models have a long history of use in describing and forecasting the movements of people as well as goods and services, making them a natural basis for disease transmission rates over distance. In agent-based micro-simulations, gravity models can be directly used to represent movement of individuals and hence disease. In this paper, we consider a range of gravity models as fits to movement data from the UK and the US. We examine the ability of synthetic networks generated from fitted models to match those from the data in terms of epidemic behaviour; in particular, times to first infection. For both datasets, best fits are obtained with a two-piece 'matched' power law distance distribution. Epidemics on synthetic UK networks match well those on data networks across all but the small

SUBMITTER: Truscott J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3475681 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature