Weak Convergence of a Seasonally Forced Stochastic Epidemic Model

Abstract

In this study we extend the results of Kurtz (1970,1971) to show the weak convergence of epidemic processes that include explicit time dependence, specifically where the transmission parameter,$\beta (t)$, carries a time dependency. We first show that when population size goes to infinity, the time inhomogeneous process converges weakly to the solution of the mean-field ODE. Our second result is that, under proper scaling, the central limit type fluctuations converge to a diffusion process.