A Novel Approach to Modeling and Visualisation of Epidemic Outbreaks: Combining Manual and Automatic Calibration

In this paper, we present an approach which couples a calibration algorithm for a compartmental model of infection dynamics with a graphical user interface which allows to visualise the modeling results and to simulate control measures aimed at curtailing the spread of infection. Unlike the most popular approaches related to visualisation of disease dynamics, our method simultaneously allows to obtain the parameter values based on epidemic data and change these values in interactive mode. The simulation tool built according to this principle is intended to help the interdisciplinary teams to obtain parameter values based on objective and subjective (domain-specific) criteria. We demonstrate the usage of the resulting modeling and visualisation framework using influenza outbreak data in Saint Petersburg for two epidemic seasons.