Bayesian Methods for Calibrating Health Policy Models: A Tutorial

This article reports on a cost-effectiveness analysis of rotavirus vaccination, including varying degrees of severity, age-dependency of clinical manifestation, and additional features of the disease (e.g., the possibility of reinfection and varying degrees of partial immunity conferred by natural infection). The authors developed a Markov model that reflects key features of rotavirus infection, using the most recent data available at the time of their analysis. They applied the model to the 2004 Vietnamese birth cohort…

Motivated by observed discrepancies between 2 published studies on the cost-effectiveness of rotavirus vaccination in Vietnam, the authors' objectives were to illustrate a specific, systematic approach to assessing model (structure and process) uncertainty and to quantify explicitly the contributions of different sources of variation in the outputs of different studies that share the same research question. On the basis of a series of working definitions of key model elements, the authors developed 5 alternative computer…

Stochastic transmission dynamic models are especially useful for studying the early emergence of novel pathogens given the importance of chance events when the number of infectious individuals is small. However, methods for parameter estimation and prediction for these types of stochastic models remain limited. This paper describes a calibration and prediction framework for stochastic compartmental transmission models of epidemics. The proposed method applies a linear noise approximation to describe the size of the fluctuations, and…