PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Madhurima Nath
AU  - Yihui Ren
AU  - Yasamin Khorramzadeh
AU  - Stephen Eubank
TI  - Determining whether a class of random graphs is consistent with an observed contact network
AID  - 10.1101/168047
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 168047
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/27/168047.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/27/168047.full
AB  - We demonstrate a general method to analyze the sensitivity of attack rate in a network model of infectious disease epidemiology to the structure of the network. We use Moore and Shannon’s “network reliability” statistic to measure the epidemic potential of a network. A number of networks are generated using exponential random graph models based on the properties of the contact network structure of one of the Add Health surveys. The expected number of infections on the original Add Health network is significantly different from that on any of the models derived from it. Because individual-level transmissibility and network structure are not separately identifiable parameters given population-level attack rate data it is possible to re-calibrate the transmissibility to fix this difference. However, the temporal behavior of the outbreak remains significantly different. Hence any estimates of the effectiveness of time dependent interventions on one network are unlikely to generalize to the other. Unfortunately, we do not yet have a set of sufficient statistics for specifying a contact network model.