Billions of users of mobile phones, social media platforms, and other technologies generate an increasingly large volume of data that has the potential to be leveraged towards solving public health challenges. These and other big data resources tend to be most successful in epidemiological applications when utilized within an appropriate conceptual framework. Here, we demonstrate the importance of assumptions about host mobility in a framework for dynamic modeling of infectious disease spread among districts within a large urban area. Our analysis focused on spatial and temporal variation in the transmission of dengue virus (DENV) during a series of large seasonal epidemics in Lahore, Pakistan during 2011–2014. Similar to many directly transmitted diseases, DENV transmission occurs primarily where people spend time during daytime hours, given that DENV is transmitted by a day-biting mosquito. We inferred spatiotemporal variation in DENV transmission under five different assumptions about mobility patterns among ten districts of Lahore: no movement among districts, movement following patterns of geo-located tweets, movement proportional to district population size, and movement following the commonly used gravity and radiation models. Overall, we found that inferences about spatiotemporal variation in DENV transmission were highly sensitive to this range of assumptions about intra-urban human mobility patterns, although the three assumptions that allowed for a modest degree of intra-urban mobility all performed similarly in key respects. Differing inferences about transmission patterns based on our analysis are significant from an epidemiological perspective, as they have different implications for where control efforts should be targeted and whether conditions for transmission became more or less favorable over time.

中文翻译：

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关于登革热病毒传播时空变化的推论对人类流动性的假设很敏感：使用来自巴基斯坦拉合尔的地理定位推文的案例研究。

数十亿手机、社交媒体平台和其他技术的用户产生了越来越多的数据，这些数据有可能被用来解决公共卫生挑战。当在适当的概念框架内使用时，这些和其他大数据资源往往在流行病学应用中最为成功。在这里，我们展示了关于宿主流动性假设在大城市地区内传染病传播动态建模框架中的重要性。我们的分析侧重于 2011-2014 年期间在巴基斯坦拉合尔发生的一系列大型季节性流行病期间登革热病毒 (DENV) 传播的时空变化。与许多直接传播的疾病类似，DENV 传播主要发生在人们白天花费时间的地方，鉴于 DENV 是由白天叮咬的蚊子传播的。我们在关于拉合尔十个地区的流动模式的五种不同假设下推断了 DENV 传播的时空变化：地区之间没有移动、遵循地理定位推文模式的移动、与地区人口规模成比例的移动以及遵循常用的重力和辐射的移动楷模。总体而言，我们发现关于 DENV 传播时空变化的推断对有关城市内人类流动模式的一系列假设高度敏感，尽管允许适度程度的城市内流动性的三个假设在关键方面都表现相似。从流行病学的角度来看，基于我们的分析得出的关于传播模式的不同推论意义重大，