Stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome

This thesis investigates the representation of a stochastic epidemic process as a directed random graph; we use this representation to impute the missing information in final size data to make Bayesian statistical inference about the model parameters using MCMC techniques. The directed random graph...

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Main Author: White, Simon Richard
Format: Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
Language:English
Published: 2010
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11274/
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author White, Simon Richard
author_facet White, Simon Richard
author_sort White, Simon Richard
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description This thesis investigates the representation of a stochastic epidemic process as a directed random graph; we use this representation to impute the missing information in final size data to make Bayesian statistical inference about the model parameters using MCMC techniques. The directed random graph representation is analysed, in particular its behaviour under the condition that the epidemic has a given final size. This is used to construct efficient updates for MCMC algorithms. The MCMC method is extended to include two-level mixing models and two-type models, with a general framework given for an arbitrary number of levels and types. Partially observed epidemics, that is, where the number of susceptibles is unknown or where only a subset of the population is observed, are analysed. The method is applied to several well known data sets and comparisons are made with previous results. Finally, the method is applied to data of an outbreak of Equine Influenza (H3N8) at Newmarket in 2003, with a comparison to another analysis of the same data. Practical issues of implementing the method are discussed and are overcome using parallel computing (GNU OpenMP) and arbitrary precision arithmetic (GNU MPFR).
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spelling nottingham-112742025-02-28T11:12:24Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11274/ Stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome White, Simon Richard This thesis investigates the representation of a stochastic epidemic process as a directed random graph; we use this representation to impute the missing information in final size data to make Bayesian statistical inference about the model parameters using MCMC techniques. The directed random graph representation is analysed, in particular its behaviour under the condition that the epidemic has a given final size. This is used to construct efficient updates for MCMC algorithms. The MCMC method is extended to include two-level mixing models and two-type models, with a general framework given for an arbitrary number of levels and types. Partially observed epidemics, that is, where the number of susceptibles is unknown or where only a subset of the population is observed, are analysed. The method is applied to several well known data sets and comparisons are made with previous results. Finally, the method is applied to data of an outbreak of Equine Influenza (H3N8) at Newmarket in 2003, with a comparison to another analysis of the same data. Practical issues of implementing the method are discussed and are overcome using parallel computing (GNU OpenMP) and arbitrary precision arithmetic (GNU MPFR). 2010-07-19 Thesis (University of Nottingham only) NonPeerReviewed application/pdf en arr https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11274/1/White_SR.pdf White, Simon Richard (2010) Stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. Stochastic epidemics Markov chain Monte Carlo
spellingShingle Stochastic epidemics
Markov chain Monte Carlo
White, Simon Richard
Stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome
title Stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome
title_full Stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome
title_fullStr Stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome
title_full_unstemmed Stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome
title_short Stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome
title_sort stochastic epidemics conditioned on their final outcome
topic Stochastic epidemics
Markov chain Monte Carlo
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11274/