Methods for calculating credible intervals for ratios of beta distributions with application to relative risks of death during the second plague pandemic

Abstract

Employing historical records we are able to estimate the risk of premature death during the second plague pandemic, and identify the Black Death and pestis secunda epidemics. We show a novel method of calculating Bayesian credible intervals for a ratio of beta distributed random variables and use this to quantify uncertainty of relative risk estimates for these two epidemics which we consider in a 2 × 2 contingency table framework.