The effects of heterogeneity on stochastic cycles in epidemics.

ABSTRACT: Models of biological processes are often subject to different sources of noise. Developing an understanding of the combined effects of different types of uncertainty is an open challenge. In this paper, we study a variant of the susceptible-infective-recovered model of epidemic spread, which combines both agent-to-agent heterogeneity and intrinsic noise. We focus on epidemic cycles, driven by the stochasticity of infection and recovery events, and study in detail how heterogeneity in susceptibilities and propensities to pass on the disease affects these quasi-cycles. While the system can only be described by a large hierarchical set of equations in the transient regime, we derive a reduced closed set of equations for population-level quantities in the stationary regime. We analytically obt

SUBMITTER: Herrerias-Azcue F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5636822 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature