Dataset Information

Evaluating empirical contact networks as potential transmission pathways for infectious diseases.

ABSTRACT: Networks are often used to incorporate heterogeneity in contact patterns in mathematical models of pathogen spread. However, few tools exist to evaluate whether potential transmission pathways in a population are adequately represented by an observed contact network. Here, we describe a novel permutation-based approach, the network k-test, to determine whether the pattern of cases within the observed contact network are likely to have resulted from transmission processes in the network, indicating that the network represents potential transmission pathways between nodes. Using simulated data of pathogen spread, we compare the power of this approach to other commonly used analytical methods. We test the robustness of this technique across common sampling constraints, including undetected cases, unobserved individuals and missing interaction data. We also demonstrate the application of this technique in two case studies of livestock and wildlife networks. We show that the power of the k-test to correctly identify the epidemiologic relevance of contact networks is substantially greater than other methods, even when 50% of contact or case data are missing. We further demonstrate that the impact of missing data on network analysis depends on the structure of the network and the type of missing data.

SUBMITTER: VanderWaal K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5014053 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Evaluating empirical contact networks as potential transmission pathways for infectious diseases.

VanderWaal Kimberly K Enns Eva A EA Picasso Catalina C Packer Craig C Craft Meggan E ME

Journal of the Royal Society, Interface 20160801 121

Networks are often used to incorporate heterogeneity in contact patterns in mathematical models of pathogen spread. However, few tools exist to evaluate whether potential transmission pathways in a population are adequately represented by an observed contact network. Here, we describe a novel permutation-based approach, the network k-test, to determine whether the pattern of cases within the observed contact network are likely to have resulted from transmission processes in the network, indicati ...[more]

PMID: 27488249

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Project description:BackgroundThe integration of empirical data in computational frameworks designed to model the spread of infectious diseases poses a number of challenges that are becoming more pressing with the increasing availability of high-resolution information on human mobility and contacts. This deluge of data has the potential to revolutionize the computational efforts aimed at simulating scenarios, designing containment strategies, and evaluating outcomes. However, the integration of highly detailed data sources yields models that are less transparent and general in their applicability. Hence, given a specific disease model, it is crucial to assess which representations of the raw data work best to inform the model, striking a balance between simplicity and detail.MethodsWe consider high-resolution data on the face-to-face interactions of individuals in a pediatric hospital ward, obtained by using wearable proximity sensors. We simulate the spread of a disease in this community by using an SEIR model on top of different mathematical representations of the empirical contact patterns. At the most detailed level, we take into account all contacts between individuals and their exact timing and order. Then, we build a hierarchy of coarse-grained representations of the contact patterns that preserve only partially the temporal and structural information available in the data. We compare the dynamics of the SEIR model across these representations.ResultsWe show that a contact matrix that only contains average contact durations between role classes fails to reproduce the size of the epidemic obtained using the high-resolution contact data and also fails to identify the most at-risk classes. We introduce a contact matrix of probability distributions that takes into account the heterogeneity of contact durations between (and within) classes of individuals, and we show that, in the case study presented, this representation yields a good approximation of the epidemic spreading properties obtained by using the high-resolution data.ConclusionsOur results mark a first step towards the definition of synopses of high-resolution dynamic contact networks, providing a compact representation of contact patterns that can correctly inform computational models designed to discover risk groups and evaluate containment policies. We show in a typical case of a structured population that this novel kind of representation can preserve in simulation quantitative features of the epidemics that are crucial for their study and management.

Dataset Information

Evaluating empirical contact networks as potential transmission pathways for infectious diseases.

Publications

Evaluating empirical contact networks as potential transmission pathways for infectious diseases.

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