High-resolution semi-parametric Bayesian modelling of human contact dynamics.

人类接触动力学的高分辨率半参数贝叶斯建模。

• 批准号: 2602755
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Imperial College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2602755
• 关键词: resolution; semi; parametric; Bayesian; modelling

This project falls within the EPSRC mathematical sciences research area.Project summaries: Infectious diseases, such as HIV, are transmitted through close human sexual contacts. To understand the disease spread and characterise dynamic human sexual behaviours within a closed population, statistical models are essential to infer contact patterns at high resolution (1-year age bands by gender). The contact patterns, encoded in contact matrices, quantify the number of sexual partners in a year with a specific age-gender population by one person in a target age-gender group. In the context of HIV, the contact patterns are inferred based on unprecedented sexual contact data from the longitudinal open Rakai Community Cohort Study (RCCS) in Uganda, East Africa, where the reporting bias and survey limitations exist. Existing literature shows evidence of the under-reporting issue of women, which introduces the reporting bias by gender. However, the potential factors that would cause the under-reporting issue of women are still unclear. We leverage the symmetric property of contacts and rely on the male-reported contact data to capture the under-reported contacts of women. Additionally, we analyse the occupations of women in order to explore the distribution of the under-reporting issue among women. Another issue of the survey is that participants reported without much detail on the partner involved, which introduced uninformative contacts. To this end, collaborating with the Rakai Health Sciences Program, we develop a semi-parametric Bayesian model which estimates high-resolution contact patterns that adjusts for the potential effects of under-reporting contacts and uninformative contacts in a unified framework. In the framework, contact patterns are described through random functions, and computationally efficiently approximated with Hilbert Space Gaussian processes priors. We focus on 40 surveyed communities in inland and fishing areas around Lake Victoria, and on two survey rounds from August 2011 to August 2013 and from June 2018 to November 2020, respectively. We uncover substantial under-reporting of sexual contacts by women within their communities in the high-HIV-prevalence fishing communities, and less so in the lower-prevalence inland communities. The under-reporting adjusted sexual contact intensities in fishing communities are nearly two-fold higher than in inland communities, and their age structure differs considerably. Over time, we find no significant changes in sexual contact patterns in inland and fishing communities respectively. Our findings indicate that there were no substantial changes in sexual contact behaviour from 2011 to 2020 in Rakai, Uganda that could causally explain the marked changes in HIV incidence during the same time period. Additionally, we investigate certain occupations (such as sex work) of women that significantly correlate to under-reported contacts. In applying our model to the RCCS contact survey, we provide a detailed picture of the sexual contact patterns by gender. This work promises to aid the understanding of sexual contact behaviour in East Africa, more realistic parameterisations of infectious disease models, and a deeper understanding of how HIV-related diseases are propagated through populations.

该项目属于EPSRC数学科学研究领域的福尔斯。项目概述：传染病，如艾滋病毒，是通过密切的人类性接触传播的。为了了解疾病的传播和封闭人群中的动态人类性行为，统计模型对于推断高分辨率的接触模式（按性别划分的1岁年龄段）至关重要。在接触矩阵中编码的接触模式，量化了目标年龄性别组中一个人在一年中与特定年龄性别人群的性伴侣数量。在艾滋病毒的情况下，接触模式推断前所未有的性接触数据的纵向开放Rakai社区队列研究（RCCS）在乌干达，东非，存在的报告偏见和调查的局限性。现有文献显示，有证据表明妇女报告不足的问题，这导致了按性别分列的报告偏见。然而，造成妇女报告不足问题的潜在因素仍不清楚。我们利用接触的对称属性，并依靠男性报告的接触数据来捕获女性的低报接触。此外，我们还分析了妇女的职业，以探讨妇女中报告不足问题的分布情况。调查的另一个问题是，参与者报告的有关合作伙伴的细节不多，这导致了信息量不大的接触。为此，与Rakai健康科学计划合作，我们开发了一个半参数贝叶斯模型，该模型估计了高分辨率的接触模式，在统一的框架中调整了漏报接触和无信息接触的潜在影响。在该框架中，接触模式描述通过随机函数，并计算有效地近似希尔伯特空间高斯过程先验。我们重点调查了维多利亚湖周边内陆和渔业地区的40个社区，分别于2011年8月至2013年8月和2018年6月至2020年11月进行了两轮调查。我们发现，在艾滋病毒高流行率的渔业社区，妇女在其社区内的性接触大量少报，而在低流行率的内陆社区则少报。在渔业社区，低报的调整后的性接触强度几乎是内陆社区的两倍，其年龄结构差异很大。随着时间的推移，我们发现内陆和渔业社区的性接触模式没有显着变化。我们的研究结果表明，从2011年到2020年，乌干达Rakai的性接触行为没有发生实质性变化，这可以解释同一时期艾滋病毒发病率的显著变化。此外，我们调查了女性的某些职业（如性工作），这些职业与报告不足的接触密切相关。在将我们的模型应用于RCCS接触调查时，我们提供了按性别划分的性接触模式的详细图片。这项工作有望帮助了解东非的性接触行为，更现实的传染病模型参数化，以及更深入地了解艾滋病毒相关疾病如何通过人群传播。