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Concept
Compartmental models in epidemiology
Summary
Compartmental models are a very general modelling technique. They are often applied to the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. The population is assigned to compartments with labels – for example, S, I, or R, (Susceptible, Infectious, or Recovered). People may progress between compartments. The order of the labels usually shows the flow patterns between the compartments; for example SEIS means susceptible, exposed, infectious, then susceptible again.
The origin of such models is the early 20th century, with important works being that of Ross in 1916, Ross and Hudson in 1917, Kermack and McKendrick in 1927 and Kendall in 1956. The Reed-Frost model was also a significant and widely-overlooked ancestor of modern epidemiological modelling approaches.
The models are most often run with ordinary differential equations (which are deterministic), but can also be used with a stochastic (random) framework, which is more realistic but much more complicated to analyze.
Models try to predict things such as how a disease spreads, or the total number infected, or the duration of an epidemic, and to estimate various epidemiological parameters such as the reproductive number. Such models can show how different public health interventions may affect the outcome of the epidemic, e.g., what the most efficient technique is for issuing a limited number of vaccines in a given population.
The SIR model is one of the simplest compartmental models, and many models are derivatives of this basic form. The model consists of three compartments:
S: The number of susceptible individuals. When a susceptible and an infectious individual come into "infectious contact", the susceptible individual contracts the disease and transitions to the infectious compartment.
I: The number of infectious individuals. These are individuals who have been infected and are capable of infecting susceptible individuals.
R for the number of removed (and immune) or deceased individuals. These are individuals who have been infected and have either recovered from the disease and entered the removed compartment, or died.
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