Need for speed: An optimized gridding approach for spatially explicit disease simulations.

ABSTRACT: Numerical models for simulating outbreaks of infectious diseases are powerful tools for informing surveillance and control strategy decisions. However, large-scale spatially explicit models can be limited by the amount of computational resources they require, which poses a problem when multiple scenarios need to be explored to provide policy recommendations. We introduce an easily implemented method that can reduce computation time in a standard Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Removed (SEIR) model without introducing any further approximations or truncations. It is based on a hierarchical infection process that operates on entire groups of spatially related nodes (cells in a grid) in order to efficiently filter out large volumes of susceptible nodes that would otherwise have required expens

SUBMITTER: Sellman S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5906030 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature