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Spatial modeling of individual‐level infectious disease transmission: Tuberculosis data in Manitoba, Canada
Author(s) -
Amiri Leila,
Torabi Mahmoud,
Deardon Rob,
Pickles Michael
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
statistics in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.996
H-Index - 183
eISSN - 1097-0258
pISSN - 0277-6715
DOI - 10.1002/sim.8863
Subject(s) - covariate , infectious disease (medical specialty) , tuberculosis , infectivity , statistics , demography , transmission (telecommunications) , estimation , demographics , maximization , population , econometrics , medicine , computer science , environmental health , disease , geography , immunology , mathematics , telecommunications , mathematical optimization , virus , management , pathology , sociology , economics
Geographically dependent individual level models (GD‐ILMs) are a class of statistical models that can be used to study the spread of infectious disease through a population in discrete‐time in which covariates can be measured both at individual and area levels. The typical ILMs to illustrate spatial data are based on the distance between susceptible and infectious individuals. A key feature of GD‐ILMs is that they take into account the spatial location of the individuals in addition to the distance between susceptible and infectious individuals. As a motivation of this article, we consider tuberculosis (TB) data which is an infectious disease which can be transmitted through individuals. It is also known that certain areas/demographics/communities have higher prevalent of TB (see Section 4 for more details). It is also of interest of policy makers to identify those areas with higher infectivity rate of TB for possible preventions. Therefore, we need to analyze this data properly to address those concerns. In this article, the expectation conditional maximization algorithm is proposed for estimating the parameters of GD‐ILMs to be able to predict the areas with the highest average infectivity rates of TB. We also evaluate the performance of our proposed approach through some simulations. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed method provides reliable estimates of parameters which confirms accuracy of the infectivity rates.