title: Measures of disassortativeness and their application to directly transmitted infections.
abstract: We propose a measure of disassortativeness to summarize contact patterns relevant to the transmission of directly transmitted infections. We discuss the properties of this measure, describe standardization relative to homogeneous mixing, and generalize it to multivariate contact structures. We explore some of its properties and apply our methods to serological surveys of close contact infections and surveys of self-reported social contacts obtained in several European countries.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK76AA, UK. C.P.Farrington@open.ac.uk
authors.forename: C P
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Farrington
authors.forename: H J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Whitaker
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wallinga
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Manfredi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001699:Biometry / Q000379:methods*; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D018562:Disease Transmission, Infectious / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D011159:Population Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D016016:Proportional Hazards Models; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods; D012307:Risk Factors