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。项目摘要：通过紧密的人类性接触传播传染病，例如HIV。为了了解疾病的传播并表征了封闭人群中动态人类性行为的表征，统计模型对于高分辨率（通过性别1岁）推断接触模式至关重要。在接触矩阵中编码的接触模式，在目标年龄段中，一个人与特定年龄性别人群的一年中的性伴侣数量量化。在艾滋病毒的背景下，基于在东非乌干达的纵向开放Rakai社区队列研究（RCC）的前所未有的性接触数据推断出接触模式，那里存在报告偏见和调查限制的情况。现有文献显示了妇女报告不足问题的证据，该问题引入了性别的报告偏见。但是，尚不清楚导致妇女报告不足问题的潜在因素。我们利用联系人的对称特性，并依靠男性报告的接触数据来捕获妇女报告不足的联系。此外，我们分析了妇女的职业，以探讨妇女报告不足问题的分布。该调查的另一个问题是，参与者报告了所涉及的合作伙伴没有太多详细介绍，这引入了非信息联系。为此，我们与Rakai Health Sciences计划合作，我们开发了一个半参数贝叶斯模型，该模型估算了高分辨率接触模式，该模式可以调整统一框架中报告不足的接触和非信息性接触的潜在影响。在框架中，通过随机函数描述了接触模式，并用希尔伯特太空高斯工艺先验进行计算有效近似。我们专注于维多利亚湖周围内陆和捕鱼区的40个被调查的社区，以及2011年8月至2013年8月和2018年6月至2020年11月的两次调查。我们发现，在较低的捕捞社区中，妇女在其社区中妇女的性接触大量报道不足，而在较低的内陆社区中则较少。捕鱼社区中报告的调整不足的性接触强度近二倍，其年龄结构差异很大。随着时间的流逝，我们发现内陆和捕鱼社区的性接触模式没有显着变化。我们的发现表明，从2011年到2020年，在乌干达的拉凯（Rakai），性接触行为没有实质性变化，可以因果解释同一时期内艾滋病毒发病率的明显变化。此外，我们调查了某些与不足报告的接触关系显着相关的妇女的职业（例如性工作）。在将我们的模型应用于RCC联系调查时，我们提供了性别的性接触模式的详细图片。这项工作有望帮助理解东非的性接触行为，传染病模型的更现实的参数化，以及对如何通过人群传播与HIV相关疾病的更深入了解。