Undergraduate Mathematical Sciences Seminar
Thursday, April 5, 12:30--1:50pm
Estimating the distribution of the incubation period of HIV/AIDS
The incubation period of HIV/AIDS is the period between the time of
HIV
infection and the onset of the disease AIDS. Knowledge of the
distribution
of the incubation period is important for predicting the future
course of
the HIV/AIDS epidemic. However, it is difficult to estimate this
distribution, since we often don't know exactly when someone got
infected
with HIV, and sometimes we also don't know when someone developed
AIDS. So
we have little information about the incubation period. We will
discuss
nonparametric statistical methods for this problem, and apply these
techniques to data from the Amsterdam Cohort Study of injecting drug
users.