A marginal moment matching approach for fitting endemic‐epidemic models to underreported disease surveillance counts

Count data are often subject to underreporting, especially in infectious disease surveillance. We propose an approximate maximum likelihood method to fit count time series models from the endemic‐epidemic class to underreported data. The approach is based on marginal moment matching where underreported processes are approximated through completely observed processes from the same class. Moreover, the form of the bias when underreporting is ignored or taken into account via multiplication factors is analyzed. Notably, we show that this leads to a downward bias in model‐based estimates of the effective reproductive number. A marginal moment matching approach can also be used to account for reporting intervals which are longer than the mean serial interval of a disease. The good performance of the proposed methodology is demonstrated in simulation studies. An extension to time‐varying parameters and reporting probabilities is discussed and applied in a case study on weekly rotavirus gastroenteritis counts in Berlin, Germany.