Methods for calculating credible intervals for ratios of beta distributions with application to relative risks of death during the second plague pandemic

Maria Bekker Nielsen Dunbar; Thomas J.R. Finnie; Barney Sloane; Ian Hall

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0211633

Methods for calculating credible intervals for ratios of beta distributions with application to relative risks of death during the second plague pandemic

Maria Bekker Nielsen Dunbar^*, Thomas J.R. Finnie, Barney Sloane, Ian Hall

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Employing historical records we are able to estimate the risk of premature death during the second plague pandemic, and identify the Black Death and pestis secunda epidemics. We show a novel method of calculating Bayesian credible intervals for a ratio of beta distributed random variables and use this to quantify uncertainty of relative risk estimates for these two epidemics which we consider in a 2 × 2 contingency table framework.

Original language	English
Article number	e0211633
Journal	PLoS ONE
Volume	14
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211633
Publication status	Published - Feb 2019

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
MBND, TJRF, IMH were supported by National Institute for Health Research—Health Protection Research Unit for Modelling Methodology (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/hpru-modelling). The research leading to these results has received grant-in-aid funding. MBND, TJRF, and IMH are funded by the National Institute for Health Research—Health Protection Research Unit for Modelling Methodology (HPRU MM). The funding bodies (UK government and HPRU MM) did not play any role in the formulation of this manuscript. The authors declare no conflict of interest. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Public Health England or English Heritage. We gratefully acknowledge the help and contributions of Steven Dyke who contributed to the calculation of the posterior distribution.

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abstract = "Employing historical records we are able to estimate the risk of premature death during the second plague pandemic, and identify the Black Death and pestis secunda epidemics. We show a novel method of calculating Bayesian credible intervals for a ratio of beta distributed random variables and use this to quantify uncertainty of relative risk estimates for these two epidemics which we consider in a 2 × 2 contingency table framework.",

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Methods for calculating credible intervals for ratios of beta distributions with application to relative risks of death during the second plague pandemic

Abstract

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