A zero-inflated endemic-epidemic model with an application to measles time series in Germany

Count data with an excess of zeros are often encountered when modeling infectious disease occurrence. The degree of zero inflation can vary over time due to nonepidemic periods as well as by age group or region. A well-established approach to analyze multivariate incidence time series is the endemic-epidemic modeling framework, also known as the HHH approach. However, it assumes Poisson or negative binomial distributions and is thus not tailored to surveillance data with excess zeros. Here, we propose a multivariate zero-inflated endemic-epidemic model with random effects that extends HHH. Parameters of both the zero-inflation probability and the HHH part of this mixture model can be estimated jointly and efficiently via (penalized) maximum likelihood inference using analytical derivatives. We found proper convergence and good coverage of confidence intervals in simulation studies. An application to measles counts in the 16 German states, 2005-2018, showed that zero inflation is more pronounced in the Eastern states characterized by a higher vaccination coverage. Probabilistic forecasts of measles cases improved when accounting for zero inflation. We anticipate zero-inflated HHH models to be a useful extension also for other applications and provide an implementation in an R package.