bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/340661; this version posted June 6, 2018. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. Applying particle filtering in both aggregated and age-structured population compartmental models of pre-vaccination measles Xiaoyan Li1*, Alexander Doroshenko2, Nathaniel D. Osgood1 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada 2 Department of Medicine, Division of Preventive Medicine, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada *
[email protected] Abstract Measles is a highly transmissible disease and is one of the leading causes of death among young children under 5 globally. While the use of ongoing surveillance data and { recently { dynamic models offer insight on measles dynamics, both suffer notable shortcomings when applied to measles outbreak prediction. In this paper, we apply the Sequential Monte Carlo approach of particle filtering, incorporating reported measles incidence for Saskatchewan during the pre-vaccination era, using an adaptation of a previously contributed measles compartmental model. To secure further insight, we also perform particle filtering on an age structured adaptation of the model in which the population is divided into two interacting age groups { children and adults. The results indicate that, when used with a suitable dynamic model, particle filtering can offer high predictive capacity for measles dynamics and outbreak occurrence in a low vaccination context. We have investigated five particle filtering models in this project. Based on the most competitive model as evaluated by predictive accuracy, we have performed prediction and outbreak classification analysis.