Contact tracing data collected from disease outbreaks has received relatively
little attention in the epidemic modelling literature because it is thought to
be unreliable: infection sources might be wrongly attributed, or data might be
missing due to resource contraints in the questionnaire exercise. Nevertheless,
these data might provide a rich source of information on disease transmission
rate. This paper presents novel methodology for combining contact tracing data
with rate-based contact network data to improve posterior precision, and
therefore predictive accuracy. We present an advancement in Bayesian inference
for epidemics that assimilates these data, and is robust to partial contact
tracing. Using a simulation study based on the British poultry industry, we
show how the presence of contact tracing data improves posterior predictive
accuracy, and can directly inform a more effective control strategy.Comment: 40 pages, 9 figures. Submitted to Biostatistic
