Critical behaviour in multiscale epidemic models based on force of infection
Published in Thesis Repository of the University of Padua, 2024
This is a copy of my Master Thesis in the course of Physics of Data in the academic year 2023/2024.
The results obtained and showed in the thesis showcase a formulation of the force of infection that incorporates the impact of mobility between italian provinces on the spreading of infectious diseases. We introduce a metapopulation model in which each node represents an italian province, connected by mobility flows derived from real data. We then calibrate the model on real data from the 2023/2024 influenza season in Italy, through the estimation of the disease transmission rate via a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO).