Contact intervals, survival analysis of epidemic data, and estimation of R_0

Abstract

We argue that the time from the onset of infectiousness to infectious contact, which we call the contact interval, is a better basis for inference in epidemic data than the generation or serial interval. Since contact intervals can be right-censored, survival analysis is the natural approach to estimation. Estimates of the contact interval distribution can be used to estimate R_0 in both mass-action and network-based models.

30 pages, 4 figures; submitted to Biostatistics

References in corpus (2)

• Second look at the spread of epidemics on networks
• Generation interval contraction and epidemic data analysis

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