Relative precision of each index.

<p>The order of the networks is organized according to their increasing assortative coefficient (from negative to positive), and values in brackets under the network names are the coefficient of each network. Mean and minimum relative precision values of each index are shown in last two columns. The mean value is used as an indicator of average performance and minimum value is used as a measure of robustness performance.</p

Affiliations of the proposed indices.

<p>CD-based indices represent four proposed indices as CD-LD-k, CD*LD-k, CD-k and CDI, where <i>k</i> is the value of threshold in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0146727#pone.0146727.e001" target="_blank">Eq 1</a>.</p

Index complexity.

<p>All complexities of indices in this table are estimated by the worst condition of networks. CP represents the complexity of an index.</p

Flow diagram for the compartment model of the transmission dynamics of CA-MRSA for each age group.

<p> is the number of susceptible people with no prior colonization with CA-MRSA, is the number of people colonized for the first time, and are the number of people with first-time infection. are individuals with a history of past infections. People with infections from both groups ( and ) become colonized () with a common cure rate (). Further decolonization treatment (e.g. mupirocin) clears individuals and progress to the susceptible state (). Susceptible individuals with or without past infections progress to the colonized stage with the same force of infection , but their progression rate from colonized to infected stages are different ( vs , respectively). Colonized individuals without past infections have only spontaneous decolonization with rate while those with past infections are subject to additional decolonization treatment with rate . is the population immigration/migration rate per month.</p

PRCC and under different intervention strategies.

<p>Upper panel: PRCC of (, level of contact reduction in age group ), with based on a sample of size 100 using LHS (A1); for different levels of contact reduction under uncertainty of other model parameters (A2); and for different level of population-wide contact reduction under the uncertainty of other parameters(A3). Lower panel: PRCC of (, decolonization treatment coverage in age group ), with based on a sample of size 100 using LHS (B1); for different levels of decolonization treatment coverage under uncertainty of other model parameters (B2); and for different levels of population-wide decolonization treatment coverage under the uncertainty of other parameters (B3).</p

Mean value of for a combined strategy of with different levels of reduction in contact of infected individuals () and decolonization treatment coverage the infected () in all age groups under parameter uncertainty.

<p>Mean value of for a combined strategy of with different levels of reduction in contact of infected individuals () and decolonization treatment coverage the infected () in all age groups under parameter uncertainty.</p

Uncertainty and sensitivity analyses on the control reproduction number .

<p>Histogram of (A) and PRCC of parameters with (B) with parameter uncertainty (based on a random sample of size 500 of Markov chain for parameters).</p

Monthly contact rates among age groups ().

<p>Calculated from survey data on physical contacts from Mossong et al. <a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003328#pcbi.1003328-Mossong1" target="_blank">[25]</a>.</p

Epidemiological parameters: definition, symbol, and initial value and range used in parameter estimation using the MCMC technique.

<p>‘Proposed’ in reference column means proposed by primary analysis of the data.</p

Mean with different levels of decolonization treatment coverage for colonized people in various combinations of two of pediatric groups.

<p>The error bars are based on standard deviations of s under parameter uncertainty.</p