Welcome to EMOD modeling for general disease¶

The Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) develops disease modeling software that is thoroughly tested and shared with the research community to advance the understanding of disease dynamics. This software helps determine the combination of health policies and intervention strategies that can lead to disease eradication. If you encounter any issues while using the software, please contact support@idmod.org.

Epidemiological MODeling software (EMOD), is an agent-based model (ABM) that simulates the simultaneous interactions of agents in an effort to recreate complex phenomena. Each agent (such as a human or vector) can be assigned a variety of “properties” (for example, age, gender, etc.), and their behavior and interactions with one another are determined by using decision rules. These models have strong predictive power and are able to leverage spatial and temporal dynamics.

EMOD is also stochastic, meaning that there is randomness built into the model. Infection and recovery processes are represented as probabilistic Bernoulli random draws. In other words, when a susceptible person comes into contact with a pathogen, they are not guaranteed to become infected. Instead, you can imagine flipping a coin that has a λ chance of coming up tails S(t) times, and for every person who gets a “head” you say they are infected. This randomness better approximates what happens in reality. It also means that you must run many simulations to determine the probability of particular outcomes.

Documentation structure¶

Using the model contains information that will help you get started with EMOD, including installation instructions, a basic overview of the software, and some example simulations you can run on your computer.

Understanding the model contains more detailed information about the disease biology, workings of the EMOD model, complete parameter reference, and a glossary.

Advancing the model contains information for researchers and developers who want to modify the EMOD source code to add more functionality to the model.

The EMOD documentation is broken up into disease-specific sets that provide guidance for researchers modeling particular diseases. The documentation contains only the parameters, output reports, and other components of the model that are available to use with this disease model.

For example, this documentation set includes installation and usage instructions for the Generic model, which can be used to simulate a variety of different diseases.

Using the model

Understanding the model