Predicting and Evaluating the Epidemic Trend of Ebola Virus Disease in the 2014-2015 Outbreak and the Effects of Intervention Measures

Guo, Zuiyuan; Xiao, Dan; Li, Dongli; Wang, Xiuhong; Wang, Yayu; Yan, Tiecheng; Wang, Zhiqi

The values of the parameters in the models shown in Fig 6A and 6B were obtained in three ways. The first way involved consultation of references, and the official websites of the WHO and the United Nations (noted as Reference in Table 1 ). For parameters that could not be obtained directly from published data, the second way, namely establishing the best fit model was used. The nonlinear least-squares method was used to achieve optimized curve-fitting in Matlab software. The values of parameters could be determined when the residual sum of squares of the simulation value and the WHO reported value was minimized (noted as nonlinear least-squares in Table 1 ). The third way was simple arithmetic calculations based on the values of parameters obtained from the former two approaches (noted as calculation in Table 1 ).