Title: Survival Dynamical Systems : Micro Models from Macro Perspective
Speaker: Grzegorz Rempala - The Ohio State University
Abstract: Motivated by the classical Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemic models proposed by Kermack and Mckendrick, we consider a class of stochastic compartmental dynamical systems with a notion of partial ordering among the compartments. We call such systems Survival Dynamical System (SDS) and show that they may be described in terms of survival functions instead of population counts. This survival model interpretation allows us to employ tools from survival analysis to address various issues with data collection and statistical inference in classical compartmental models. In particular, we propose and numerically validate a statistical inference procedure based on SDS-likelihoods. We use the SIR model as a running example throughout the paper to illustrate the ideas. (joint work with Wasiur Khudabukhsh and Eben Kenah)