Estimating within-household contact networks from egocentric data

Abstract

Acute respiratory diseases are transmitted over networks of social contacts. Large-scale simulation models are used to predict epidemic dynamics and evaluate the impact of various interventions, but the contact behavior in these models is based on simplistic and strong assumptions which are not informed by survey data. These assumptions are also used for estimating transmission measures such as the basic reproductive number and secondary attack rates. Development of methodology to infer contact networks from survey data could improve these models and estimation methods. We contribute to this area by developing a model of within-household social contacts and using it to analyze the Belgian POLYMOD data set, which contains detailed diaries of social contacts in a 24-hour period. We model dependency in contact behavior through a latent variable indicating which household members are at home. We estimate age-specific probabilities of being at home and age-specific probabilities of contact conditional on two members being at home. Our results differ from the standard random mixing assumption. In addition, we find that the probability that all members contact each other on a given day is fairly low: 0.49 for households with two 0-5 year olds and two 19-35 year olds, and 0.36 for households with two 12-18 year olds and two 36+ year olds. We find higher contact rates in households with 2-3 members, helping explain the higher influenza secondary attack rates found in households of this size. © Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2011.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 92,471

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

Social network size in humans.R. A. Hill & R. I. M. Dunbar - 2003 - Human Nature 14 (1):53-72.
The Household as the Foundation of Aristotle's Polis.D. Brendan Nagle - 2006 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-06-02

Downloads
2 (#1,809,379)

6 months
2 (#1,206,545)

Historical graph of downloads

Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references