ArticlePLoS computational biology2012
Inferring the structure of social contacts from demographic data in the analysis of infectious diseases spread.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 108 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
108 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 227 citations in OpenAlex.
- Methods for Health Economic Evaluation of Vaccines and Immunization Decision Frameworks: A Consensus Framework from a European Vaccine Economics Community.PharmacoEconomics · 2016Pooled it
- Household crowding, social mixing patterns and respiratory symptoms in seven countries of the African meningitis belt.PloS one · 2014Trial
- Health Economic Evaluation of Varicella Vaccination Within the Swedish National Vaccination Programme for Children.Acta paediatrica (Oslo, Norway : 1992) · 2026Article
- MEmilio: a high performance Modular EpideMIcs simuLatIOn software for multi-scale and comparative simulations of infectious disease dynamics.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The impact of school-based mitigation measures on the transmission of respiratory pathogens: the case of SARS-CoV-2.International journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- A comparison of contact patterns derived from the population structure in agent-based models and empirical contact survey data.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Estimating modern US social contact patterns, the ENGAGED study: a study protocol for a staggered longitudinal cohort study.BMJ open · 2026Article
- VIBES: A multiscale modeling approach integrating within-host and between-hosts dynamics in epidemics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The influence of age-dependent susceptibility on RSV transmission dynamics and immunisation population-level impact.BMC medicine · 2026Article
- Socioeconomic determinants of protective behaviors and contact patterns in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era: A cross-sectional study in Italy.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Multilayer networks describing urban interactions for building the digital twins of five cities in Spain.Scientific data · 2025Article
- A novel framework for inferring dynamic infectious disease transmission with graph attention: a COVID-19 case study in Korea.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Article
- The Big Bang of an epidemic: a metapopulation approach to identify the spatiotemporal origin of contagious diseases and their universal spreading pattern.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Novel travel time aware metapopulation models and multi-layer waning immunity for late-phase epidemic and endemic scenarios.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Generalized contact matrices allow integrating socioeconomic variables into epidemic models.Science advances · 2024Article
- Emergence of the reproduction matrix in epidemic forecasting.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Review
- Morocco's population contact matrices: A crowd dynamics-based approach using aggregated literature data.PloS one · 2024Article
48 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Social contact patterns among individuals encode the transmission route of infectious diseases and are a key ingredient in the realistic characterization and modeling of epidemics. Unfortunately, the gathering of high quality experimental data on contact patterns in human populations is a very difficult task even at the coarse level of mixing patterns among age groups. Here we propose an alternative route to the estimation of mixing patterns that relies on the construction of virtual populations parametrized with highly detailed census and demographic data. We present the modeling of the population of 26 European countries and the generation of the corresponding synthetic contact matrices among the population age groups. The method is validated by a detailed comparison with the matrices obtained in six European countries by the most extensive survey study on mixing patterns. The methodology presented here allows a large scale comparison of mixing patterns in Europe, highlighting general common features as well as country-specific differences. We find clear relations between epidemiologically relevant quantities (reproduction number and attack rate) and socio-demographic characteristics of the populations, such as the average age of the population and the duration of primary school cycle. This study provides a numerical approach for the generation of human mixing patterns that can be used to improve the accuracy of mathematical models in the absence of specific experimental data.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.