Open AccessMethods for calculating credible intervals for ratios of beta distributions with application to relative risks of death during the second plague pandemic
Author(s) -
Maria BekkerNielsen Dunbar,
Thomas Finnie,
Barney Sloane,
Ian Hall
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0211633
Subject(s) - plague (disease) , pandemic , yersinia pestis , statistics , bayesian probability , credible interval , relative risk , covid-19 , epidemic model , mathematics , confidence interval , medicine , biology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , environmental health , genetics , disease , pathology , virulence , gene , population
Employing historical records we are able to estimate the risk of premature death during the second plague pandemic, and identify the Black Death and pestis secunda epidemics. We show a novel method of calculating Bayesian credible intervals for a ratio of beta distributed random variables and use this to quantify uncertainty of relative risk estimates for these two epidemics which we consider in a 2 × 2 contingency table framework.