Journal article
Systematic selection between age and household structure for models aimed at emerging epidemic predictions
- Abstract:
- Numerous epidemic models have been developed to capture aspects of human contact patterns, making model selection challenging when they fit (often-scarce) early epidemic data equally well but differ in predictions. Here we consider the invasion of a novel directly transmissible infection and perform an extensive, systematic and transparent comparison of models with explicit age and/or household structure, to determine the accuracy loss in predictions in the absence of interventions when ignoring either or both social components. We conclude that, with heterogeneous and assortative contact patterns relevant to respiratory infections, the model’s age stratification is crucial for accurate predictions. Conversely, the household structure is only needed if transmission is highly concentrated in households, as suggested by an empirical but robust rule of thumb based on household secondary attack rate. This work serves as a template to guide the simplicity/accuracy trade-off in designing models aimed at initial, rapid assessment of potential epidemic severity.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, 1018.4KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41467-019-14229-4
Authors
- Publisher:
- Nature Research
- Journal:
- Nature Communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 906
- Place of publication:
- England
- Publication date:
- 2020-02-14
- Acceptance date:
- 2019-12-20
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2041-1723
- Pmid:
-
32060265
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1087560
- Local pid:
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pubs:1087560
- Deposit date:
-
2020-04-07
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Pellis, L., Cauchemez, S., Ferguson, N.M. et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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