Tuesday, 11 October 2022

Andrew and I both have talks tomorrow, so I’m bummed I have to miss his. I’ll be talking about Pathfinder at the Polytechnique:

Hi! PARIS Seminar – Bob Carpenter, 11 October 2022

As you may recall from his earlier post, Andrew’s giving a talk on causal inference the same day at Marie Curie in the center of Paris.

Thursday, 13 October 2022

On Thursday, I’ll be giving a talk on SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing to France Mentre’s group at Paris Diderot / INSERM. Here’s the title and abstract:

Test Site Variation and Sensitivity Time Trends in Covid Diagnostic Tests

I’ll present two relatively simple models of Covid test sensitivity and specificity. In the first, sensitivity and specificity are allowed to vary by test site. We use calibration tests at sites for known positive or known negative cases to develop a hierarchical model to predict accuracy at a new site. I’ll present results for the data from Santa Clara early in the pandemic. This first model can act as a component in any diagnostic study, much like a PK model for a drug can be coupled with a range of PD models. In the second model, sensitivity is allowed to grow from infection to a peak at symptom onset and decay after that. I’ll provide several parameterizations and show results for different cohorts of patience. I’ll discuss coupling the second model with time trends of infection fatality and hopspitalization in order to infer population infection levels. Theoretically, these models are easy to combine, but practically speaking, we do not have a good data set to fit a joint model without very strong assumptions.

The first model is joint work with Andrew Gelman (Columbia University). The second model is joint work with Tom Ward (UK Health Security Agency).

The location is

2.30 pm, Oct 13, University Paris Diderot, 16 rue Henri Huchard, room 342

and apparently you have to leave ID with security in order to access floor 3 (it’s in the medical school).