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Introduction
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October 2016 - present
Publications
Publications (15)
The use of social contact rates is widespread in infectious disease modeling since it has been shown that they are key driving forces of important epidemiological parameters. Quantification of contact patterns is crucial to parameterize dynamic transmission models and to provide insights on the (basic) reproduction number. Information on social int...
The use of social contact rates is widespread in infectious disease modeling since it has been shown that they are key driving forces of important epidemiological parameters. Quantification of contact patterns is crucial to parametrize dynamic transmission models and to provide insights on the (basic) reproduction number. Information on social inte...
Small area estimation is an important tool to provide area-specific estimates of population characteristics for governmental organizations in the context of education, public health and care. However, many demographic and health surveys are unrepresentative at a small geographical level, as often areas at a lower level are not included in the sampl...
Many methods used in spatial statistics are computationally demanding, and so, the development of more computationally efficient methods has received attention. A important development is the integrated nested Laplace approximation method which is carry out Bayesian analysis more efficiently This method, for geostatistical data, is done considering...
The use of social contact rates is widespread in infectious disease modelling, since it is known that they provide proxies of crucial determinants of epidemiological and disease transmission parameters. Information on social contact rates can, for example, be obtained from a population-based contact diary survey, such as the POLYMOD study. Estimati...
In geostatistics, both kriging and smoothing splines are commonly used to generate an interpolated map of a quantity of interest. The geoadditive model proposed by Kammann and Wand (J R Stat Soc: Ser C (Appl Stat) 52(1):1–18, 2003) represents a fusion of kriging and penalized spline additive models. Complex data issues, including non-linear covaria...
Obtaining reliable estimates about health outcomes for areas or domains where only few to no samples are available is the goal of small area estimation (SAE). Often, we rely on health surveys to obtain information about health outcomes. Such surveys are often characterised by a complex design, stratification, and unequal sampling weights as common...
In observational surveys, post-stratification is used to reduce bias resulting from differences between the survey population and the population under investigation. However, this can lead to inflated post-stratification weights and, therefore, appropriate methods are required to obtain less variable estimates. Proposed methods include collapsing p...
Dynamic transmission models are essential to design and evaluate control strategies for airborne infections. Our objective was to develop a dynamic transmission model for seasonal influenza allowing to evaluate the impact of vaccinating specific age groups on the incidence of infection, disease and mortality. Projections based on such models heavil...
Risk groups with increased vulnerability for influenza complications such as pregnant women, persons with underlying illnesses as well as persons who come into contact with them, such as health care workers, are currently given priority (along with other classic target groups) to receive seasonal influenza vaccination in Belgium. We aimed to evalua...
In surveys, when the number of respondents in a post-stratum is small relative to the population size in that post-stratum, post-stratification weights are inflated and modifications are required to obtain less variable estimates. Weight smoothing models, random-effects models that induce shrinkage across post-stratum means, are such modifying meth...
In 2003, an internet-based monitoring system of influenza-like illness (ILI), the Great Influenza Survey (GIS), was initiated in Belgium. For the Flemish part of Belgium, we investigate the representativeness of the GIS population and assess the validity of the survey in terms of ILI incidence during eight influenza seasons (from 2003 through 2011)...
