Abstract—Although methods for parameter estimation for stochastic models of disease transmission are now well-established, the picture is much less clear for model assessment. We consider various approaches for model choice problems in the context of data on disease outbreaks collected at the level of individual households. The study provides practical values to identify feasible and numerical efficient model for given epidemic data.

Index Terms—Model choice, stochastic epidemic models, reversible jump MCMC, Bayes factor.

C. H. Wen is with university of Nottingham Ningbo, China (tel.: + (86)-574-88181407; fax: +(86)-574-88180175; e-mail: alan.wen@nottingham.edu.cn). P. H. O’Neill is with university of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom.

Cite: C. H. Wen and P. H. O’Neill, "Model Choice for Stochastic Epidemics in Households," International Journal of Applied Physics and Mathematics  vol. 2, no. 5, pp. 376-378, 2012.