Back

SEIR Filter: A Stochastic Model of Epidemic

Smid, M.; Berec, L.; Kubena, A. A.; Levinsky, R.; Trnka, J.; Tucek, V.; Zajicek, M.

2021-02-19 epidemiology
10.1101/2021.02.16.21251834 medRxiv
Show abstract

There are many epidemiological models at hand to cope with the present pandemic; it is, however, difficult to calibrate these models when data are noisy, partial or observed only indirectly. It is also difficult to distinguish relevant data from noise, and to distinguish the impact of individual determinants of the epidemic. In mathematical statistics, the tools to handle all of these phenomena exist; however, they are seldom used for epidemiological models. The goal of this paper is to start filling this gap by proposing a general stochastic epidemiological model, which we call SEIR Filter. Technically our model is a heterogeneous partially observable vector autoregression model, in which we are able to express closed form formulas for the distribution of compartments and observations, so both maximum likelihood and least square estimators are analytically tractable. We give conditions for vanishing, explosion and stationary behaviour of the epidemic and we are able to express a closed form formula for reproduction number. Finally, we present several examples of the models application. We construct an estimate age-cohort model of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic. To demonstrate the strengths of the model, we employ it to analyse and compare three vaccination scenarios.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.