[Turing-Southampton] S3RI seminar: Simon Spencer, Thursday 2-3pm

[Ogden H.E.]

Dear all,

On Thursday (16 May) at 2pm in 54 / 7035 (7B), we have an S3RI seminar from Simon Spencer (University of Warwick) on "Bayesian inference and model selection for stochastic epidemics". Details are given below.

The seminar will also be available via a live web-cast at
https://coursecast.soton.ac.uk/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=61ca882e-d2e5-463a-808c-aa45010b5f34

The talk will be followed by tea and cake in the staff reading room on level 4 of building 54.

All are welcome!

Best wishes,

Helen

Bayesian inference and model selection for stochastic epidemics (with special attention to Escherichia coli O157:H7 in cattle)

Simon Spencer
Department of Statistics, University of Warwick

Model fitting for epidemics is challenging because not all of the information needed to write down the likelihood function is observable, for example the times of infection and recovery are not usually observed. Furthermore, the data that are available from diagnostic tests may not be perfectly accurate. These considerations are typically overcome by applying computationally intensive data augmentation techniques such as Markov chain Monte Carlo.

To make things even more difficult, most of the interesting epidemiological questions are best expressed as model selection problems and so fitting just one model is not sufficient to answer them. Instead we must fit a range of different models, each representing an important epidemiological hypothesis, and then make meaningful comparisons between them. I will describe how to overcome (most of) these difficulties to learn about the epidemiology of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in cattle.

Joint work with Panayiota Touloupou, Bärbel Finkenstädt Rand, Pete Neal and TJ McKinley.

For the current schedule of S3RI seminars, see https://tinyurl.com/s3riseminar<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2Fs3riseminar&data=01%7C01%7C%7C6ece484b88a94b1463a608d6d77346dc%7C4a5378f929f44d3ebe89669d03ada9d8%7C0&sdata=FCCzFE2oJRfz8eONk5S6S7igHopxZuyMBhlEgNvz0qA%3D&reserved=0>
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