paramix

paramix simplifies transformations between high and low resolution data in infectious disease compartmental models, particularly for calculating age-sensitive measures like years of life lost.

Key Features:

• Parameter aggregation and disaggregation: Facilitates aggregation and disaggregation of epidemic parameters and outcomes for modeling and simulation.
• Age-structured resolution transformation: Enables movement between detailed population age-structure and broad age categories such as children, working-age adults, and seniors.
• Years of life lost calculation: Supports disaggregation of low-resolution outcomes back to high resolution for calculating YLLs in health economic analyses.
• Benchmark comparison: Provides methods that consistently yield estimates most similar to high-resolution models for the same computational burden of low-resolution models.

Scientific Applications:

• Infectious disease compartmental modeling: Supports calculation of disease transmission, estimation of underlying rates, forecasting of future burden, and comparison of benefits across intervention scenarios.
• Health economic evaluation: Enables calculation of years of life lost for cost-effectiveness analyses and estimation of incremental cost-effectiveness ratios.
• Age-stratified epidemic parameter estimation: Facilitates discretisation of key epidemic parameters like infection-fatality ratio for lower resolution age groups.

Methodology:

paramix implements computational methods for aggregation and disaggregation steps between high and low resolution data, with specific application to age-structured infectious disease models. The package was evaluated against alternative methods using an archetypal model with comparison to a high-resolution benchmark.