Estimation and Short-Term Prediction of the Course of the HIV Epidemic Using Demographic and Health Survey Methodology-Like Data

摘要

BackgroundMathematical models have played important roles in the understanding of epidemics and in the study of the impacts of various behavioral or medical measures. However, modeling accurately the future spread of an epidemic requires context-specific parameters that are difficult to estimate because of lack of data. Our objective is to propose a methodology to estimate context-specific parameters using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS)-like data that can be used in mathematical modeling of short-term HIV spreading.