Theory of forecastability for emerging and eliminable infectious diseases

This project tackles four problems in the theory of emergence forecasting:

  1. Discrete systems
  2. Periodically forced systems
  3. Large dimensionality
  4. Hidden states

These problems are not part of the basic theory of critical slowing down, but are common in the real world. Our basic strategy is to formulate the minimally complex model that exhibits the problem of interest and to study that analytically to the extent possible. When model complexity outstrips tractability, we turn to numerical methods. Our aim is to see just how complicated a disease transmission system must be for the theory of critical slowing down to break down.