Frequently asked questions

Why doesn’t anything happen when I double-click Eradication.exe?

Unlike many executable files, Eradication.exe does not open a software installer when double-clicked. Instead, you must provide Eradication.exe with various input files used to run a simulation and create outputs. You can run simulations in a number of ways. The simplest way to learn about the model is to run individual simulations at the command line. However, because EMOD is a stochastic model, this is not feasible when you must run many simulations to create useful output for statistical analysis. Once you advance to that stage, you will want to use other software tools to run multiple simulations either locally or, more often, on an HPC cluster. For more information, see EMOD installation and Running a simulation.

Where do I get demographics and climate files?

IDM provides demographics and climate files for many different regions of the world in the EMOD-InputData GitHub repository. See EMOD installation for download instructions. If there are no files available for the region you are interested in, contact support@idmod.org.

How do I plot my output?

EMOD does not produce plots of the data by default. Instead, it produces JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) or CSV files that you can then parse and plot using Python, MATLAB, R, or another programming language. The EMOD scenarios zip file contains input files and plotting scripts for many different disease modeling scenarios intended to teach EMOD. You may want to review these files to see examples of how the output can be plotted.

Does your model include X?

Many aspects of disease dynamics are explicitly modeled in EMOD. Review EMOD parameter reference for an exhaustive list of all parameters that can be used to enable functionality in EMOD. If you want to model something that isn’t listed there, EMOD provides highly flexible functionality with the individual and node property feature. These properties label individuals or regional nodes in a simulation so you can change disease outbreaks, transmission dynamics, behavior, or treatment based on the assigned values. For example, you can add properties to represent vitamin deficiencies, comorbidities, and more. For more information, see Individual and node properties.

If individual and node properties cannot incorporate the functionality you need, EMOD is open-source software that can be extended to meet your needs. For more information, see EMOD source code installation.

Can I model regions, countries, provinces, or cities?

EMOD uses nodes to represent geographic areas. Each node has a population and associated characteristics. Individuals and, if relevant, vectors can migrate between nodes. Nodes can represent areas of any scale you like, from entire countries to individual households.

Do you have a model for disease X?

The software architecture of EMOD has a “generic model” base upon which more specific transmission modes and diseases are built. This allows common functionality to be shared for modeling a variety of diseases. For example, the generic model can be used to model influenza, measles, and more. You can also use one of the transmission mode simulation types (airborne, STI, environmental, vector) to model diseases such as herpes, typhoid, dengue or others that we don’t explicitly support. Often, this can be done without the need to make any source code changes.