Dynamic calibration with approximate Bayesian computation for a microsimulation of disease spread

The global COVID-19 pandemic brought considerable public and policy attention to the field of infectious disease modelling. A major hurdle that modellers must overcome, particularly when models are used to develop policy, is quantifying the uncertainty in a model’s predictions. By including the most recent available data in a model, the quality of its predictions can be improved and uncertainties reduced. This paper adapts an existing, large-scale, individual-based COVID-19 model to explore the benefits of updating the model in pseudo-real time. We use Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) to dynamically recalibrate the model’s parameter values as new data emerge. ABC offers advantages over alternative calibration methods by providing information about the uncertainty associated with particular parameter values and the resulting COVID-19 predictions through posterior distributions. Analysing such distributions is crucial in fully understanding a model and its outputs. We find that forecasts of future disease infection rates are improved substantially by incorporating up-to-date observations and that the uncertainty in forecasts drops considerably in later simulation windows (as the model is provided with additional data). This is an important outcome because the uncertainty in model predictions is often overlooked when models are used in policy.