A nonparametric estimation for infectious diseases with latent period

Abstract

Predicting the future contagion of infectious diseases depends on the ability to estimate the current number of cases of infection. In this paper, a full smoothing method is proposed to evaluate the number of daily new cases of infection during the epidemic period. Under mild regularity assumptions, we obtain the consistency and asymptotic normality of the resulting estimator. Both simulated examples and a real data example are used for illustration.

Keywords:

• Nonparametric estimation
• infection curve
• epidemic
• full smoothing estimation

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to anonymous referees for detailed comments that helped to clarify the proofs and the presentation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 11671115] and the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province of China [grant number LY14A010025].