HIV with contact-tracing: a case study in Approximate Bayesian Computation

Understand

Missing data is a recurrent issue in epidemiology where the infection process may be partially observed.

• Approximate Bayesian Computation, an alternative to data imputation methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo integration, is proposed for making inference in epidemiological models.
• It is a likelihood-free method that relies exclusively on numerical simulations.
• ABC consists in computing a distance between simulated and observed summary statistics and weighting the simulations according to this distance.