UCPH Statistics Seminar: Samir Bhatt

Speaker: Samir Bhatt from the University of Copenhagen

Title: Branching processes for infectious disease modelling: a personal journey

Abstract: In this talk, I will first begin with an overview of how practitioners model infectious diseases, and how equivalences exist. I will then present a case that the most appropriate model is built from the general branching process (also called the Crump Mode Jagers process). I will present how we extend the general branching process to be time varying, and then a series of analytical results with direct relevance to infectious disease modelling. I will then focus on uncertainty, and how our new model helps us correctly interpret uncertainty in outbreaks. In this second section on uncertainty, I will present analytical results decomposing the variance of a general branching process. Finally, I will discuss ideas about applications in phylogenetics. I will aim to not make the talk too technical, and focus on the scientific results this new theory has allowed us to disentangle.