Using heterogeneity in the population structure of U.S. swine farms to compare transmission models for porcine epidemic diarrhoea

Eamon B. O’Dea; Harry Snelson; Shweta Bansal

Our first main finding is that our correlation analysis method may for a range of parameter values remain sensitive to transmission and contact parameters of interest in spite of receiving partial, biased, and noisy data about the state of simulated epizootics as input. In short, the signals generated by the heterogeneity in the structure of the swine herd were not drowned out by the substantial noise generated by the observation model. The potential of herd structure to strongly influence the dynamics of swine diseases has been noted in previous work, 39 The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It . https://doi.org/10.1101/017178 doi: bioRxiv preprint opinion to set them. 41, 42 Estimates such as ours may thus be key for determining what parameter values are consistent with past epizootics.