Host Heterogeneity and Disease Endemicity: A Moment-Based Approach

This paper investigates the possibility of understanding the effects of host heterogeneity on disease levels through the use of moment approximations. The approach is to avoid assumptions about the distribution of mixing rates (or other parameters) in the population, by treating the low-order moments of the distribution as estimable parameters. This approach, while approximate, can greatly reduce the number of parameters needed to explore the …