Estimating Initial Epidemic Growth Rates

The initial exponential growth rate of an epidemic is an important measure of disease spread, and is commonly used to infer the basic reproduction number $$\mathcal{R}_{0}$$. While modern techniques (e.g., MCMC and particle filtering) for parameter estimation of mechanistic models have gained popularity, maximum likelihood fitting of phenomenological models remains important due to its simplicity, to the difficulty of using modern methods in …