Analysis of infectious disease data from a sample of households. (English) Zbl 0782.92015

Becker, Niels G.

Applied Probability, Proc. Symp., Sheffield/UK 1990, IMS Lect. Notes, Monogr. Ser. 18, 27-40 (1991).

Summary: [For the entire collection see Zbl 0752.00055.]
Observations are made on the individuals from a sample of households at two points in time. At the first time point it is determined who is susceptible to a certain infectious disease. At the second time point it is determined which of the susceptibles have been infected. A method for the analysis of such data is derived with the aid of martingale theory and suitable epidemic model assumptions. In contrast to a previously proposed analysis [see M. Haber, I. M. Longini and G. A. Cotsonis, Biometrics 44, No. 1, 163-173 (1988; Zbl 0707.62247)] the present approach requires only a modest amount of manual calculation and is based on less restrictive assumptions. An application to influenza data is given.

MSC:

92D30

Epidemiology

Keywords:

martingale theory; influenza data

Citations:

Zbl 0752.00055; Zbl 0707.62247