Recalibrating disease parameters for increasing realism in modeling epidemics in closed settings.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The homogeneous mixing assumption is widely adopted in epidemic modelling for its parsimony and represents the building block of more complex approaches, including very detailed agent-based models. The latter assume homogeneous mixing within schools, workplaces and households, mostly for the lack of detailed information on human contact behaviour within these settings. The recent data availability on high-resolution face-to-face interactions makes it now possible to assess the goodness of this simplified scheme in reproducing relevant aspects of the infection dynamics.

Methods

We consider empirical contact networks gathered in different contexts, as well as synthetic data obtained through realistic models of contacts in structured populations. We perform stochasti

SUBMITTER: Bioglio L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5109722 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature