Simulation of Populations in a Time-, Age- and Duration Dependent Illness-Death Model

TL;DR

This paper presents a simulation framework for populations in a complex illness-death model considering time, age, and duration dependencies, with implementation details and a hypothetical example.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation approach for the illness-death model incorporating multiple dependencies, enhancing analysis of chronic disease progression.

Findings

Simulation framework accurately models population dynamics

Implementation details facilitate practical application

Example demonstrates model's potential for disease analysis

Abstract

Relevant events in a three state illness-death model (IDM) of a chronic disease are the diagnosis of the disease and death with or without the disease. In this article a simulation framework for populations moving in the IDM is presented. The simulation is closely related to the concept of Lexis diagrams in event history analysis. Details of the implementation and an example of a hypothetical disease are described.