Inference and control of the nosocomial transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Pei, Sen; Morone, Flaviano; Liljeros, Fredrik; Makse, Hernán; Shaman, Jeffrey L

In this study, we focus on the inference of three transmission-related parameters: the nosocomial transmission rate b, the infection importation rate I 0 and the colonization importation rate C 0 . The initial prior ranges for these parameters are reported in Table 1 . Other disease-related parameters, for example the spontaneous decolonization rate a, the infection progress rate p, and the recovery rate , are drawn uniformly from ranges obtained from previous studies for each individual in the agent-based model (see Table 1 ). Should more specific information about these parameters become available, it may be possible in the future to better constrain the model with their incorporation into the system. In synthetic testing of the IF-EAKF algorithm, we use weekly incidence as observations.