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David Welch
Study systems include
Networks
Rapidly evolving viruses (FIV, HIV)
Measles
Selected publications
Chris Groendyke, David Welch and David Hunter (to appear) A Network-based Analysis of the 1861 Hagelloch Measles Data. Preprint here.
David Welch, Shweta Bansal and David Hunter. (to appear, Epidemics) Statistical inference to advance network models in epidemiology.
Chris Groendyke, David Welch and David Hunter (to appear, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics) Bayesian inference for contact networks from epidemic data.
Tina Toni, David Welch, N. Strelkowa, A. Ipsen and Michael Stumpf (2009). Approximate Bayesian Computation scheme for parameter inference and model selection in dynamical systems. Journal of the Royal Society Interface 6, 187-202.
Geoff Nicholls, David Welch, (2007), TraitLab: Software for fitting tree-like binary trait data. Software and manual available online
David Welch, Geoff Nicholls, Allen Rodrigo and Wiremu Solomon (2005). Integrating genealogy and epidemiology: The ancestral infection and selection graph as a model for reconstructing host virus histories. Theoretical Population Biology. 68: 65-75.
Quentin Atkinson, Geoff Nicholls, David Welch and Russell Gray (2005). From Words to Dates: Water Into Wine, Mathemagic or Phylogenetic Inference?. Quantitative Methods in Language Comparison. Special issue of Transactions of the Philological Society, McMahon, A. (Ed) 103.
Research interests
In October, I moved to the University of Auckland, New Zealand. My new homepage is at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~davidw.
I am a statistician working on methods for estimating contact networks using genetic and social data. The work is aimed at understanding:
- The spread of disease
- The structure of populations in which disease spreads
The networks I am interested in are defined by the mode of transmission of a disease. The nodes of the network are typically the individuals in the host population. The edges between nodes represent some type of infectious contact or path along which the disease is transmitted. For example, in vertically transmitted or inherited diseases, the edges may represent parent-child relationships; in horizontally transmitted diseases, they may represent blood transfer.
Working with others in CIDD, I am:
- Developing stochastic models for these networks
- Estimating model parameters using different types of data
- We estimate model parameters using stochastic simulation tools such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). Developing these tools is a major part of my research.
