February 17-21, 2020. Conference on Mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of infectious disease outbreaks
Scope
The area of mathematical modeling of infectious diseases has a long history dating back to at least Bernoulli. An important early contribution to this area was the work of Sir Donald Ross who received the Nobel prize in medicine for his work on malaria, including the first vector-host epidemic model. During the second half of the last century, some more mathematical rigorous work, also involving stochastic models, emerged, such as the celebrated threshold theorem stating that a major outbreak is possibly with positive probability if and only if the basic reproduction number R0 exceeds the critical value 1.
The 1980's and the outbreak of AIDS was perhaps the first occasion when more serious statistical analysis of outbreak data was performed, then focusing on prediction of future outbreaks with or without preventive measures put into place.
From then on, and continuously ever after, more and more realistic model extensions have been performed, allowing for main contributions from local cliques such as households, network structures, and multitype individuals. From a statistical viewpoint this has made inference procedures more and more complicated, often using computer intensive methods such as MCMC, and more recently ABC and particle filtering methods.
During the last few decades, the availability of virus sequences from infected reported cases have added new possibilities of making inferences by making use of virus evolutionary models to infer parameters of the disease spread as well.
The community of modelers in this area has grown and become more and more diverse in their skills.
In the 1990s, two workshops were organised in Luminy with "Mathematical modeling of infectious diseases" as their theme. Thereafter, other workshops took place in various cities/universities like the Isaac Newton institute (Cambridge), several times, Edinburgh, Stockholm, and Columbus Ohio. MFO Oberwolfach has organized workshops on versions of this theme every 3-4 years, the most recent one in February 2018.
The focus of the proposed conference will cover both theoretical modeling as well as applications and real data analysis. There may more focus on theory than during the other weeks. There are many important hard problems to work on, e.g. the so-called adaptive models where individuals change behavior during and because of an outbreak. Or models that better capture and understand how antibiotic resistance works. The list of possible issues includes:
- Epidemic models including space: models, analytical results and inference
- Epidemic models with changing behavior during epidemic outbreaks: models and inference
- Identifi ability issues for epidemic models and data
- Integrating epi-data and virus phylogenies
- Antibiotic resistance
Our hope is to gather an interdisciplinary and international group of active researchers who will make important contributions to these types of problems, both during the event and later on through new collaborations.
Organising Committee
Scientific Committee
Confirmed invited speakers
Inscriptions
