摘要
We present an epidemic model which can incorporate essential biological detail as well as the intrinsic demographic stochastieity of the epidemic process, yet is very simple, enabling rapid generation of a large number of simulations, A deterministic version of the model is also derived, in the limit of infinitely large populations, and a final-size formula for the deterministic model is proved. A key advantage of the model proposed is that it is possible to write down an explicit likelihood functions for it, which enables a systematic procedure for fitting parameters to real incidence data, using maximum likelihood.
