STOCHASTIC DISCRETE-TIME AGE-OF-INFECTION EPIDEMIC MODELS

We present an epidemic model which can incorporate essential biological detail as well as the intrinsic demographic stochasticity of the epidemic process, yet is very simple, enabling rapid generation of a large number of simulations. A deterministic version of the model is also derived, in the limit of infinitely large populations, and a final-size formula for the deterministic model is proved. A key advantage of the model proposed is that it is possible to write down an explicit likelihood functions for it, which enables a systematic procedure for fitting parameters to real incidence data, using maximum likelihood.