Parametric estimation of spatial-temporal Hawkes models for the spread of Ebola in West Africa in 2014

Alexandar Joshua Krebs
MS, 2017
Schoenberg, Frederic R.P
Parametric Hawkes models are proposed and fit by maximum likelihood to World Health Organization data from the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Models were fit to various sub-region-level subsets of the data to compare with previous research on compartmental models and nonparametrically estimated Hawkes processes. Models were also fit to country-level subsets and multi-country subsets to evaluate how these models perform on increasing scales. Results suggest that these spatio-temporal models are able to accurately forecast the spread of Ebola infections on larger space-time windows than have been previously researched, with the benefit of improved parameter interpretability.
2017