Online Program

Friday, October 21
Knowledge
Community
Influence
Fri, Oct 21, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
Salon 2
Speed Session 3

Statistical Analysis of the Chikungunya Fever (303290)

*Purvasha Chakravarti, Carnegie Mellon University 

Keywords: Chikungunya, SIR, Compartment models, ARIMA models.

The first locally-acquired Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infections in the Americas were reported in the Caribbean in December, 2013. Due to the recent emergence of the disease in the Americas, the current extent of spread and risk is uncertain. For taking appropriate preventive measures, it is paramount to understand the spread of the disease, but it is challenging due to limitations of current data on the outbreak and on CHIKV transmission.

We propose two models for modeling the number of infected cases of Chikungunya: a multi-country SIR model and a multi-variate ARIMA model. The different models explain different aspects of the disease spread. While the former explains the rate of spread of the disease, the latter forecasts the number of new infected cases of Chikungunya. The multi-country SIR compartment model is a proposed model, which considers a standard SIR model for every country and then incorporates infected people moving from one country to another to understand the spread of the disease. We find that the basic reproduction number, which gives a sense of the rate at which the disease spread, is 1.0314 for the Americas.