Model Selection and Evaluation Based on Emerging Infectious Disease Data Sets including A/H1N1 and Ebola

The aim of the present study is to apply simple ODE models in the area of modeling the spread of emerging infectious diseases and show the importance of model selection in estimating parameters, the basic reproduction number, turning point, and final size. To quantify the plausibility of each model, given the data and the set of four models including Logistic, Gompertz, Rosenzweg, and Richards models, the Bayes factors are calculated and the precise estimates of the best fitted model parameters and key epidemic characteristics have been obtained. In particular, for Ebola the basic reproduction numbers are 1.3522 (95% CI (1.3506, 1.3537)), 1.2101 (95% CI (1.2084, 1.2119)), 3.0234 (95% CI (2.6063, 3.4881)), and 1.9018 (95% CI (1.8565, 1.9478)), the turning points are November 7,November 17, October 2, and November 3, 2014, and the final sizes until December 2015 are 25794 (95% CI (25630, 25958)), 3916 (95% CI (3865, 3967)), 9886 (95% CI (9740, 10031)), and 12633 (95% CI (12515, 12750)) for West Africa, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, respectively. The main results confirm that model selection is crucial in evaluating and predicting the important quantities describing the emerging infectious diseases, and arbitrarily picking a model without any consideration of alternatives is problematic.