European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ECMTB 2026)

Improving the use of social contact studies in infectious disease modelling

MS159-04

15 Jul 2026, 12:10

20m

15.02 - HS (University of Graz)

Minisymposium Talk Mathematical Epidemiology Agent-based models, networks and machine-learning methods for epidemiological modelling

Speaker

Tom Britton (Stockholm University)

Description

Up until now, the main use of social contact studies in epidemic modelling has been to create a next generation matrix containing mean number of contacts between different age groups, in order to capture heterogeneity in contacts between age groups. However, empirical evidence show that the majority of variation in contacts is not between age-groups, but within age groups, and also within individuals (between different days). We propose methods for improving the analysis taking also this variation into account.