Hierarchical space-time modelling of epidemic dynam?cs: an application to measles outbreaks

摘要

How infectious diseases spread in space and time is an important ques-tion that has received considerable theoretical attention. There are, however, few empirical studies to support theoretical approaches, because data is scarce. In this paper we propose to model the epidemic spread of measles in the London boroughs between 1960 and 1970 by an extension of the Rriged Kaiman filter (Mardia et al., 1998) to count data. Results show the flexibility of our approach in describing complex spatio-temporal dynamics.