Modelling the reproductive power function

This paper discusses methods of estimating the reproductive power and the accompanying survival function of communicable events, e.g. infectious disease transmission. The early stage of an outbreak can be described by the infectiousness of the outbreak process, but in later stages of the outbreak, this is complicated by factors such as changing contact patterns and the impact of control measures. It is important to take these factors into account in order to get a good, if approximate, model for an outbreak process. This paper proposes a non-homogeneous birth process and regression model for the reproductive power function, similar to models in discrete survival analysis. A baseline reproductive power function gives a description of the outbreak when covariates are at their baseline values. As an illustration these methods are applied to an avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak among poultry in Thailand.