Comparison of alternative models of human movement and the spread of disease

Ottar N. Bjørnstad; Bryan T. Grenfell; Cecile Viboud; Aaron A. King

To advance the discussion of these issues, we considered a suite of candidate models 266 of spatial interactions and fit them to the pre-vaccination measles data from England cases. The gravity model-which has gained recent prominence in infectious disease As the gravity model has had a very rapid adoption in spatial disease epidemiology 284 during the last decade (though Noulas et al. [13] have noted the importance of 285 considering alternatives), we used this as a baseline. Despite its common usage it 286 significantly under-performs relative to the several other models. Combining SLiC and 287 LISA statistics we found that the greatest tension between the gravity model and the 288 preferred alternatives is in the Manchester-Liverpool-Leeds conurbation of northwestern 289 England, where many towns and villages commingle amongst several major cities. formulation) that spatial interaction, once discounted for higher-order interference, is 295 roughly proportional to the geometric mean of the community sizes. This curious 296 suggestion warrants future investigation.