Data Sources for Modeling Infectious Diseases

Abstract

In previous chapters, focus was placed on the description of the most important infectious disease parameters. The next chapters will make the connection between the mathematical models and statistical models in order to estimate these parameters from data. In this chapter, we present a range of datasets that are analyzed repeatedly throughout the book. The datasets are used to motivate and illustrate the methods discussed in the text. Three main data sources are being used. The first are serological data, representing the age-specific prevalence of past infection in a population.