Hierarchical Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Modeling for Multi-Pathogen Transmission of Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease

Speaker: Nikolay Bliznyuk, University of Florida

Title: Hierarchical Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Modeling for Multi-Pathogen Transmission of Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease

Abstract:

Mathematical modeling of infectious diseases plays an important role in the development and evaluation of intervention plans. These plans, such as the development of vaccines, are usually pathogen-specific, but laboratory confirmation of all pathogen-specific infections is rarely available. If an epidemic is a consequence of co-circulation of several pathogens, it is desirable to jointly model these pathogens in order to study the transmissibility of the disease. Our work is motivated by the hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) surveillance data in China. We build a hierarchical Bayesian multi-pathogen model by using a latent process to link the disease counts and the lab test data. Our model explicitly accounts for spatio-temporal disease patterns. The inference is carried out by an MCMC algorithm. We study operating characteristics of the model on simulated data and apply it to the HFMD in China data set.