Estimating household contact matrices structure from easily collectable metadata

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, interpretable parametric model to estimate household contact matrices using demographic and survey data, tested on South African proximity data, aiming to simplify contact matrix estimation for epidemic modeling.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel parametric model for household contact matrices that leverages easily collectable data, reducing the need for extensive contact surveys.

Findings

Model accurately estimates household contact patterns.

Tested on South African data with promising results.

Simplifies data collection for epidemic modeling.

Abstract

Contact matrices are a commonly adopted data representation, used to develop compartmental models for epidemic spreading, accounting for the contact heterogeneities across age groups. Their estimation, however, is generally time and effort consuming and model-driven strategies to quantify the contacts are often needed. In this article we focus on household contact matrices, describing the contacts among the members of a family and develop a parametric model to describe them. This model combines demographic and easily quantifiable survey-based data and is tested on high resolution proximity data collected in two sites in South Africa. Given its simplicity and interpretability, we expect our method to be easily applied to other contexts as well and we identify relevant questions that need to be addressed during the data collection procedure.