title: Computing back-calculation estimates of AIDS epidemic.
abstract: The method of back-calculation estimates the number of HIV infections from AIDS incidence data and projects future AIDS incidence. We explore a conditional likelihood approach for computing estimates of the number of HIV infections and the parameters in the epidemic density. This method is asymptotically equivalent to the usual likelihood method. The asymptotic normal distribution of the estimates facilitates the computation of confidence intervals. We compute standard deviations for the estimates of HIV incidence and project AIDS incidence from the underlying multinomial distributions. We illustrate the methods with applications to AIDS data in the United States.
mesh_terms: D000163:Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome / Q000453:epidemiology*; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005544:Forecasting; D015528:HIV Seroprevalence / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D015233:Models, Statistical; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology