Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 26, 2025

Methodology for Establishing a Community-Wide Life Laboratory for Capturing Unobtrusive and Continuous Remote Activity and Health Data
Published on: July 27, 2018
Situating agent-based modelling in population health research
Eric Silverman1, Umberto Gostoli2, Stefano Picascia2
1MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, 99 Berkeley Street, Glasgow, G3 7HR, UK. eric.silverman@glasgow.ac.uk.
Abstract:
Today's most troublesome population health challenges are often driven by social and environmental determinants, which are difficult to model using traditional epidemiological methods. We agree with those who have argued for the wider adoption of agent-based modelling (ABM) in taking on these challenges. However, while ABM has been used occasionally in population health, we argue that for ABM to be most effective in the field it should be used as a means for answering questions normally inaccessible to the traditional epidemiological toolkit. In an effort to clearly illustrate the utility of ABM for population health research, and to clear up persistent misunderstandings regarding the method's conceptual underpinnings, we offer a detailed presentation of the core concepts of complex systems theory, and summarise why simulations are essential to the study of complex systems. We then examine the current state of the art in ABM for population health, and propose they are well-suited for the study of the 'wicked' problems in population health, and could make significant contributions to theory and intervention development in these areas.
More Related Videos
08:03Heuristic Mining of Hierarchical Genotypes and Accessory Genome Loci in Bacterial Populations
Published on: December 7, 2021
06:55Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting Propensity Score using the Military Health System Data Repository and National Death Index
Published on: January 8, 2020
Related Concept Videos
Analysis of Population Pharmacokinetic Data
Models of Health Promotion and Illness Prevention I
The health belief model (HBM) attempts to predict health-related behavior in specific belief patterns. According to the HBM, a person's...
Models of Health Promotion and Illness Prevention II
The agent-host-environment model states that disease results...
Mechanistic Models: Compartment Models in Individual and Population Analysis
Concepts of Health and Illness
Steps in Outbreak Investigation