Document Type

Theses, Ph.D

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

1.2 COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, Information Science

Publication Details

Successfully submitted for the award of PhD.

Abstract

Infectious disease models are essential in understanding how an outbreak might occur and how best to mitigate an outbreak. One of the most important factors in modelling a disease is choosing an appropriate model and determining the assump tions needed to create the model. The main research questions this thesis addresses are how do we create a model for the spread of infectious diseases that captures heterogeneous agents without using an inordinate amount of computing power and how can we use that model to plan for future infectious disease outbreaks. We start our work by analysing and comparing equation based and agent based models and determine that an agent-based model’s stochasticity and ability to capture emerging results (complex and hard to explain results from interactions of agents) means that the agent-based model has an advantage in modelling the in dividual actions and complexities that make one infectious disease outbreak differ from another. Focusing on agent-based models, we take the model in two direc tions adding complexity and scaling up the model. Although adding complexity allows us to produce robust results, it increases run time so modelling anything beyond a small population is not feasible. Thus we focus on scaling up the model (from a town to a county) and determining what trade-offs need to be made to keep the model computationally tractable. With our scaled up model we look at characteristics of a town that come from its place in a network of towns, looking at how the centrality of a town affects how an outbreak spreads from a town and enters a town. We determine when a town has a high in degree centrality the i centrality of the other towns are not as important with respect to whether the outbreak will spread to the other towns. The additional agents in the scaled up model lead to an extended run time. In order to reduce run time we make an assumption about the importance of heterogeneous mixing when there is a large number of agents infected and create a hybrid agent-based and equation based model that switches between an agent based disease component and an equation based disease component based on a threshold of the number of agents infected. The hybrid model is able to save time compared to a fully agent-based model without losing a significant level of fidelity. This allows for the model to be scaled up to larger geographies and populations. Scaling the model to larger populations is essential in studying and testing the efficacy of interventions that would not be applicable at a smaller scale. To show this we use the hybrid model to analyse the effects of school closure policies across a network of towns, showing that closing both the town where an outbreak starts in and the town in the region with the highest in degree centrality can help mitigate an outbreak.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/tk7d-5711

Download


Share

COinS