Traditional inference for epidemic models depends on knowledge of the initial number of susceptible individuals. However, this may be difficult to obtain in practice. In this short note we show that it is possible to use data from a major epidemic to estimate the number of individuals initially...

The system for monitoring suicides in Hong Kong has considerable delays in reporting as the cause of death needs to be determined by a coroner's investigation. However, timely estimates of suicide rates are desirable to assist in the formulation of public health policies. This motivated us to...

In an outbreak of a completely new infectious disease like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), estimation of the fatality rate over the course of the epidemic is of clinical and epidemiological importance. In contrast with the constant case fatality rate, a new measure, termed the...

A two-step procedure based on the conditional likelihood is proposed to estimate the population size of a closed population using a semiparametric model for recapture studies. An asymptotic variance estimate and numerical results are presented. The method is applied to a bird banding dataset in...

In any epidemic, there may exist an unidentified subpopulation which might be naturally immune or isolated and who will not be involved in the transmission of the disease. Estimation of key parameters, for example, the basic reproductive number, without accounting for this possibility would...

The human immunodeficiency virus-acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV-AIDS) epidemic in Hong Kong has been under surveillance in the form of voluntary reporting since 1984. However, there has been little discussion or research on the reconstruction of the HIV incidence curve. This paper is...

In this paper we consider the TJW product-limit estimatorFn(x) of an unknown distribution functionFwhen the data are subject to random left truncation and right censorship. An almost sure representation of PL-estimatorFn(x) is derived with an improved error bound under some weaker assumptions....