Uncertainty on the Reproduction Ratio in the SIR Model
The aim of this paper is to understand the extreme variability on the estimated reproduction ratio R_0 observed in practice. For expository purpose we consider a discrete time stochastic version of the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model, and introduce different approximate maximum likelihood (AML) estimators of R_0. We carefully discuss the properties of these estimators and illustrate by a Monte-Carlo study the width of confidence intervals on R_0.
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