IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/biomet/v57y1970i1p141-153..html

Improvements in the estimation of the latent and infectious periods of a contagious disease

Author

Listed:
  • Norman T. J. Bailey
  • Cynthia Alff-Steinberger

Abstract

SummaryThe contagious disease model proposed by Bailey (1956a, b) predicts the frequency distribution of time intervals between the appearance of subsequent cases. Using data from households of two or three susceptibles into which a disease, measles, had been introduced, Bailey used a maximum likelihood procedure to determine various disease parameters, for example, length of the latent and infectious periods. In the original calculations, a desk calculator scoring procedure was used to maximize the likelihood. The present paper describes the application of a computer maximization technique to this problem. The computation is of course more rapid and the use of a computer permits the automatic determination of starting points for the computation, the calculation of goodness of fit X2 and facilitates variations of the model, such as the addition of an extra parameter to allow for the mis-classification of chains. The methods recommended are illustrated both by the previous measles data and by new data on infectious hepatitis.

Suggested Citation

  • Norman T. J. Bailey & Cynthia Alff-Steinberger, 1970. "Improvements in the estimation of the latent and infectious periods of a contagious disease," Biometrika, Biometrika Trust, vol. 57(1), pages 141-153.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:biomet:v:57:y:1970:i:1:p:141-153.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/biomet/57.1.141
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:biomet:v:57:y:1970:i:1:p:141-153.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/biomet .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.