Modelling continental-scale spread of Schmallenberg virus in Europe

A simple model is developed to describe the spread of SBV at a continental scale and, more specifically, within and between NUTS2 regions in Europe. Transmission between regions was modelled using a kernel-based approach; it is assumed a density-dependent formulation for the distance kernel though an alternative, density-independent formulation was as well explored.

The regions which did not become infected and did become infected both contribute to the likelihood. Non-informative (and independent) priors (diffuse exponential) were assumed for all model parameters. A Markov chain-Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach was used to generate samples from the joint posterior density for the parameters in the model. Posterior predictive checking is carried out to assess model adequacy.