Bayesian Modeling and Prediction of Generalized Contact Matrices

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Dan, Shozen, van Dyk, David A., Ling, Zhi, Mishra, Swapnil, Ratmann, Oliver
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Dan, Shozen
van Dyk, David A.
Ling, Zhi
Mishra, Swapnil
Ratmann, Oliver
author_facet Dan, Shozen
van Dyk, David A.
Ling, Zhi
Mishra, Swapnil
Ratmann, Oliver
contents Social contact matrices are essential tools in infectious disease epidemiology as they quantify close-range human contact patterns which directly drive the transmission of airborne infectious diseases. In this work we propose a Bayesian modeling framework for inferring generalized contact matrices which stratify contact matrices beyond contemporary age dimensions. The model is designed to satisfy fundamental structural assumptions of contacts while leveraging tensor structures and smoothing constraints to make high-dimensional matrix estimation computationally feasible and statistically stable. We discover a link between multi-dimensional matrix stratification subject to structural constraints with the theory of contingency tables. This enables us to approach a challenging missing-data problem commonly encountered in real-world analysis where feature information on the contacts is unobserved. We benchmark the framework against existing methods through simulation studies and illustrate the framework's practical utility through two real-world datasets: BICS (United States) and COVIMOD (Germany). Our models are implemented in an open-source Python package to facilitate adoption in the wider scientific community.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06742
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bayesian Modeling and Prediction of Generalized Contact Matrices
Dan, Shozen
van Dyk, David A.
Ling, Zhi
Mishra, Swapnil
Ratmann, Oliver
Methodology
Applications
Social contact matrices are essential tools in infectious disease epidemiology as they quantify close-range human contact patterns which directly drive the transmission of airborne infectious diseases. In this work we propose a Bayesian modeling framework for inferring generalized contact matrices which stratify contact matrices beyond contemporary age dimensions. The model is designed to satisfy fundamental structural assumptions of contacts while leveraging tensor structures and smoothing constraints to make high-dimensional matrix estimation computationally feasible and statistically stable. We discover a link between multi-dimensional matrix stratification subject to structural constraints with the theory of contingency tables. This enables us to approach a challenging missing-data problem commonly encountered in real-world analysis where feature information on the contacts is unobserved. We benchmark the framework against existing methods through simulation studies and illustrate the framework's practical utility through two real-world datasets: BICS (United States) and COVIMOD (Germany). Our models are implemented in an open-source Python package to facilitate adoption in the wider scientific community.
title Bayesian Modeling and Prediction of Generalized Contact Matrices
topic Methodology
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06742