title: Testing Modeling Assumptions in the West Africa Ebola Outbreak.
abstract: The Ebola virus in West Africa has infected almost 30,000 and killed over 11,000 people. Recent models of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) have often made assumptions about how the disease spreads, such as uniform transmissibility and homogeneous mixing within a population. In this paper, we test whether these assumptions are necessarily correct, and offer simple solutions that may improve disease model accuracy. First, we use data and models of West African migration to show that EVD does not homogeneously mix, but spreads in a predictable manner. Next, we estimate the initial growth rate of EVD within country administrative divisions and find that it significantly decreases with population density. Finally, we test whether EVD strains have uniform transmissibility through a novel statistical test, and find that certain strains appear more often than expected by chance.
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, University of California at Davis, Davis, 95616, USA.
authors.forename: Keith
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Burghardt
authors.affiliation: ABN AMRO Bank N.V., Amsterdam, 1082 PP, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Verzijl
authors.affiliation: Complex Lab, Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, 611731, P. R. China.|Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, 02115, USA.
authors.forename: Junming
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science and Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, 12203, USA.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ingram
authors.affiliation: SUTD-MIT International Design Centre &Engineering Product Development Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, 487372, Singapore.
authors.forename: Binyang
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Oregon Health &Science University, Portland, 97239, USA.
authors.forename: Marie-Pierre
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Hasne
mesh_terms: D000354:Africa, Western / Q000453:epidemiology; D004196:Disease Outbreaks; D005260:Female; D019142:Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000635:transmission*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008954:Models, Biological