Published: Sept. 9, 2016
Event Description:
Peter Shaffery, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder

Understanding Epidemic Variability using Bayesian Hierarchical Models

The relationship between ecosystem biodiversity and disease prevalence is still not well understood.Ìý In some studies results have shown biodiversity increasing disease resistance, while in others biodiversity actually promotes disease spread.Ìý Predicting when these effects will occur is an open problem for ecologists.Ìý We propose a method to understand how biodiversity drives the variability of disease outcomes, which will help ecologists better understand the error structure in their field studies.Ìý Furthermore we show numerically that increased epidemics occurring in diverse ecosystems behave more consistently than epidemics occurring in less diverse ecosystems.
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Contact Information:
Name: Ian Cunningham
Phone: 303-492-4668
Email: amassist@colorado.edu

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