The Mathematics of Serocatalytic Models With Applications to Public Health Data

Abstract

Serocatalytic models are powerful tools which can be used to infer historical infection patterns from age-structured serological surveys. These surveys are especially useful when disease surveillance is limited and have an important role to play in providing a ground truth gauge of infection burden. In this tutorial, we consider a wide range of serocatalytic models to generate epidemiological insights. With mathematical analysis, we explore the properties and intuition behind these models and include applications to real data for a range of pathogens and epidemiological scenarios. We also include practical steps and code in R and Stan for interested learners to build experience with this modeling framework. Our work highlights the usefulness of serocatalytic models and shows that accounting for the epidemiological context is crucial when using these models to understand infectious disease epidemiology.