Revealing mechanisms of infectious disease spread through empirical contact networks.

ABSTRACT: The spread of pathogens fundamentally depends on the underlying contacts between individuals. Modeling the dynamics of infectious disease spread through contact networks, however, can be challenging due to limited knowledge of how an infectious disease spreads and its transmission rate. We developed a novel statistical tool, INoDS (Identifying contact Networks of infectious Disease Spread) that estimates the transmission rate of an infectious disease outbreak, establishes epidemiological relevance of a contact network in explaining the observed pattern of infectious disease spread and enables model comparison between different contact network hypotheses. We show that our tool is robust to incomplete data and can be easily applied to datasets where infection timings of individuals are unkno

SUBMITTER: Sah P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8758098 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature