Design and Estimation for the Population Prevalence of Infectious Diseases
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Understanding the prevalence of infections in the population of interest is critical for making data-driven public health responses to infectious disease outbreaks. Accurate prevalence estimates, however, can be difficult to calculate due to a combination of low population prevalence, imperfect diagnostic tests, and limited testing resources. In addition, strategies based on convenience samples that target only symptomatic or high-risk individuals will yield biased estimates of the population prevalence. We present Bayesian multilevel regression and poststratification models that incorporate probability sampling designs, the sensitivity and specificity of a diagnostic test, and specimen pooling to obtain unbiased prevalence estimates. These models easily incorporate all available prior information and can yield reasonable inferences even with very low base rates and limited testing resources. We examine the performance of these models with an extensive numerical study that varies the sampling design, sample size, true prevalence, and pool size. We also demonstrate the relative robustness of the models to key prior distribution assumptions via sensitivity analyses.
Article activity feed
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.05.21251231: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.05.21251231: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-