CoSy Lunch Seminar 24/09

Abstract: The use of data to support decisions in public health is becoming a necessity. One example is the preparation for disease outbreaks, epidemics. Currently, in our work, we study the spread of verotoxigenic E. coli in the Swedish cattle population. We parameterize a disease-spread model by combining the high-performance simulator SimInf with the actual transport network and bacterial testing data. We perform approximate Bayesian inference by using Approximate Bayesian Computations and bootstrapped Synthetic Likelihoods. We also show how one would utilize the obtained posterior in evaluative epidemiological investigations, e.g., intervention and detection schemes.