Accounting for contact network uncertainty in epidemic inferences with Approximate Bayesian Computation.

Abstract

In models of infectious disease dynamics, the incorporation of contact network information allows for the capture of the non-randomness and heterogeneity of realistic contact patterns. Oftentimes, it is assumed that this underlying network is known with perfect certainty. However, in realistic settings, the observed data usually serves as an imperfect proxy of the actual contact patterns in the population. Furthermore, event times in observed epidemics are not perfectly recorded; individual infection and recovery times are often missing. In order to conduct accurate inferences on parameters of contagion spread, it is crucial to incorporate these sources of uncertainty. In this paper, we propose the use of Network-augmented Mixture Density Network-compressed ABC (NA-MDN-ABC) to learn informative summary statistics for the available data. This method will allow for Bayesian inference on the parameters of a contagious process, while accounting for imperfect observations on the epidemic and the contact network. We will demonstrate the use of this method on simulated epidemics and networks, and extend this framework to analyze the spread of Tattoo Skin Disease (TSD) among bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia.