Presenter: Volodymyr Minin, Professor of Statistics at UC Irvine


Description: Abstract: Concentrations of pathogen genomes measured in wastewater have recently become available as a new data source to use when modeling the spread of infectious diseases. One promising use for this
data source is inference of the effective reproduction number, the average number of individuals a newly infected person will infect. Continuous monitoring of this quantity, a task known as nowcasting, is important for maintaining public health situational awareness. We propose a model where new infections arrive according to a time-varying immigration rate which can be interpreted as an average number of secondary infections produced by one infectious individual per unit time. This model allows us to estimate the effective reproduction number from concentrations of pathogen genomes while avoiding difficult to verify assumptions about the dynamics of the susceptible population. As a byproduct of our primary goal, we also produce a new model for estimating the effective reproduction number from case data using the same framework. We test this modeling framework in an agent-based simulation study with a realistic data generating mechanism which accounts for the time-varying dynamics of pathogen shedding. We also illustrate our methodology by retrospectively analyzing SARS-CoV-2 concentrations collected from a large wastewater treatment facility in Los Angeles, California.


Bio: Minin is a Professor of Statistics at UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences and an Associate Director of the UCI Infectious Disease Science Initiative. After receiving PhD in Biomathematics at UCLA, he spent 10 years on faculty of the University of Washington before joining UC Irvine in 2017. Minin is interested in formulating stochastic models that can describe complex dynamics of biological systems and devising statistically rigorous and computationally efficient algorithms to fit these models to data. Minin is currently most active in infectious disease epidemiology, working on
Bayesian estimation of disease transmission model parameters and probabilistic forecasting. His other interests include phylogenetics, population genetics, and systems biology.


Hosted by: Statisics Department


Zoom link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98864060146?pwd=VkViL1lJY1RMVEE1dHdMWC9idGF4Zz09
 

Event Details

See Who Is Interested

  • Pratik Katte

1 person is interested in this event

User Activity

No recent activity