Introduction to statistical inference for infectious diseases

Abstract

In this paper we first introduce the general stochastic epidemic model for the spread of infectious diseases. Then we give methods for inferring model parameters such as the basic reproduction number $R_0$ and vaccination coverage $v_c$ assuming different types of data from an outbreak such as final outbreak details and temporal data or observations from an ongoing outbreak. Both individual heterogeneities and heterogeneous mixing are discussed. We also provide an overview of statistical methods to perform parameter estimation for stochastic epidemic models. In the last section we describe the problem of early outbreak detection in infectious disease surveillance and statistical models used for this purpose.