A space-time conditional intensity model for invasive meningococcal disease occurrence

Meyer, Sebastian; Elias, Johannes and Höhle, Michael (June 2012): A space-time conditional intensity model for invasive meningococcal disease occurrence. In: Biometrics, Vol. 68, No. 2: pp. 607-616

Abstract

A novel point process model continuous in space-time is proposed for quantifying the transmission dynamics of the two most common meningococcal antigenic sequence types observed in Germany 2002-2008. Modelling is based on the conditional intensity function (CIF) which is described by a superposition of additive and multiplicative components. As an epidemiological interesting finding, spread behaviour was shown to depend on type in addition to age: basic reproduction numbers were 0.25 (95% CI 0.19-0.34) and 0.11 (95% CI 0.07-0.17) for types B:P1.7-2,4:F1-5 and C:P1.5,2:F3-3, respectively. Altogether, the proposed methodology represents a comprehensive and universal regression framework for the modelling, simulation and inference of self-exciting spatio-temporal point processes based on the CIF. Usability of the modelling in biometric practice is promoted by an implementation in the R package surveillance.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Form of publication: Postprint
• Keywords: Conditional intensity function; Infectious disease surveillance data; Spatiotemporal point process; Stochastic epidemic modeling
• Faculties: Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics > Statistics
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 310 Statistics; 600 Technology > 610 Medicine and health
• ISSN: 0099-4987
• Language: English