BCAM Scientific Seminar: Statistical challenges when analysing emerging epidemic outbreaks

Abstract: 
New infectious disease outbreaks have great impact on communities over the world, as recently manifested by the Ebola outbreak. An important statistical task is then to predict the future scenario with and with out preventive measures. In the current talk we will investigate such analyses and see how it can be improved. The main catch is that in the exponentially growing phase early on in an outbreak, several biases can occur if not taken account for: events with short delays will be over-represented. 
We will give some examples from the Ebola outbreak and see how the biases can be removed or at least reduced. (Joint work with Gianpaolo Scalia Tomba).