Estimating epidemic exponential growth rate and basic reproduction number

• Main Author: Junling Ma
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. 2020-01-01
• Series: Infectious Disease Modelling
• Subjects: Epidemic curve; Exponential growth rate; Maximum likelihood estimation; Phenomenological models
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468042719300491

The initial exponential growth rate of an epidemic is an important measure of the severeness of the epidemic, and is also closely related to the basic reproduction number. Estimating the growth rate from the epidemic curve can be a challenge, because of its decays with time. For fast epidemics, the estimation is subject to over-fitting due to the limited number of data points available, which also limits our choice of models for the epidemic curve. We discuss the estimation of the growth rate using maximum likelihood method and simple models.