eprintid: 1457125 rev_number: 45 eprint_status: archive userid: 608 dir: disk0/01/45/71/25 datestamp: 2015-03-18 12:19:02 lastmod: 2021-09-19 23:32:23 status_changed: 2017-03-23 15:28:47 type: article metadata_visibility: show item_issues_count: 0 creators_name: Ball, F creators_name: Britton, T creators_name: House, T creators_name: Isham, V creators_name: Mollison, D creators_name: Pellis, L creators_name: Scalia Tomba, G title: Seven challenges for metapopulation models of epidemics, including households models ispublished: pub divisions: UCL divisions: B04 divisions: C06 divisions: F61 keywords: Metapopulations; Large sub-populations; Households note: © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). abstract: This paper considers metapopulation models in the general sense, i.e. where the population is partitioned into sub-populations (groups, patches,...), irrespective of the biological interpretation they have, e.g. spatially segregated large sub-populations, small households or hosts themselves modelled as populations of pathogens. This framework has traditionally provided an attractive approach to incorporating more realistic contact structure into epidemic models, since it often preserves analytic tractability (in stochastic as well as deterministic models) but also captures the most salient structural inhomogeneity in contact patterns in many applied contexts. Despite the progress that has been made in both the theory and application of such metapopulation models, we present here several major challenges that remain for future work, focusing on models that, in contrast to agent-based ones, are amenable to mathematical analysis. The challenges range from clarifying the usefulness of systems of weakly-coupled large sub-populations in modelling the spread of specific diseases to developing a theory for endemic models with household structure. They include also developing inferential methods for data on the emerging phase of epidemics, extending metapopulation models to more complex forms of human social structure, developing metapopulation models to reflect spatial population structure, developing computationally efficient methods for calculating key epidemiological model quantities, and integrating within- and between-host dynamics in models. date: 2015-03 official_url: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epidem.2014.08.001 vfaculties: VMPS oa_status: green full_text_type: pub language: eng primo: open primo_central: open_green verified: verified_manual elements_source: crossref elements_id: 996178 doi: 10.1016/j.epidem.2014.08.001 lyricists_name: Isham, Valerie lyricists_id: VSISH67 full_text_status: public publication: Epidemics volume: 10 pagerange: 63-67 issn: 1755-4365 citation: Ball, F; Britton, T; House, T; Isham, V; Mollison, D; Pellis, L; Scalia Tomba, G; (2015) Seven challenges for metapopulation models of epidemics, including households models. Epidemics , 10 pp. 63-67. 10.1016/j.epidem.2014.08.001 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epidem.2014.08.001>. Green open access document_url: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1457125/3/1-s2.0-S175543651400036X-main.pdf