Overcoming Challenges for Estimating Virus Spread Dynamics from Data

In this paper we investigate estimating the parameters of a discrete time networked virus spread model from time series data. We explore the effect of multiple challenges on the estimation process including system noise, missing data, time-varying network structure, and quantization of the measurements. We also demonstrate how well a heterogeneous model can be captured by homogeneous model parameters. We further illustrate these challenges by employing recent data collected from the ongoing 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak, motivating future work.