Abstract: We use simulation to analyse the family dicing game “Super Six”. In particular we show that the person starting the game has a very high chance of winning the game. Furthermore, a robust strategy to play during the game is to keep throwing the dice regardless of the number of free pits. In a mixed strategy landscape with more than two players this seems to do better than a strategy extrapolated from the analytically derived optimal strategy for the two player case. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The R-markdown sourc ..read more

Abstract: We implement Tupper’s self-referencing formula in R. This has been done before by others, but the joy was to be able to learn how to do it yourself using the tidyverse. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The R-markdown source code of this blog is available under a GNU General Public License (GPL v3) license from GitHub. Introduction Tupper’s self-referencial formula (Tupper 2001) is an equation which maps a 2D \((x,y)\) coordinate to an \(\{\text{FALSE},\text{TRUE}\}\) value. If \((x,y)\) represent pixel locations, the ..read more

Abstract: We visualize children reference populations for height, weight and body mass index by plotting percentiles of the population as a function of age. Besides the epidemiological interest in these anthropometric curves, they have dual-use potential for reproducible birthday cards. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The R-markdown source code of this blog is available under a GNU General Public License (GPL v3) license from GitHub. Introduction Percentiles of a reference population at a given age are often used to assess und ..read more

Abstract: We introduce the R package socialroulette, which is a lightweight package for handling the recurrent problem of assigning individuals into groups of a fixed size. In order to minimize reunions, we provide an algorithm to solve the task as an instance of the maximally diverse grouping problem. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The R-markdown source code of this blog is available under a GNU General Public License (GPL v3) license from GitHub. Introduction Groupings are relevant when breakout rooms, mystery lunch partiti ..read more

Abstract: When distributing individuals into groups every week for a virtual social mixer, e.g. using Zoom breakout rooms, it’s boring to end up in a group with someone, who you already met last week. We compute the probility for this to happen and state a simple rejection sampling proposal for how to increase social diversity in such groupings. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The R-markdown source code of this blog is available under a GNU General Public License (GPL v3) license from GitHub. Introduction As a pandemic re ..read more

Abstract: This page is an updated version of the 2020-12-28 blog post Age Stratified All-Cause and COVID-19 Associated Mortality. The post considers the age stratified all-cause and COVID-19 associated mortality in Germany during 2020 based on numbers provided by the Federal Statistical Office and the Robert Koch Institute. Important extensions compared to the original post are: an improved population adjusted expected mortality calculation an update of the analysis containing the 2020 numbers as of 2021-03-13 Note: The present analyses were previously kept in a separate updated R-Markdown f ..read more

Abstract: We consider the age stratified all-cause and COVID-19 associated mortality in Germany during 2020 based on numbers provided by the Federal Statistical Office and the Robert Koch Institute. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The markdown+Rknitr source code of this blog is available under a GNU General Public License (GPL v3) license from github. Introduction All-cause mortality is one of indicators used to measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, because this indicator is less biased by the testing strategy needed to ..read more

Abstract: Slides, R code and video lectures of our 2020 The Mathematics and Statistics of Infectious Disease Outbreaks summer course at Stockholm University are made available to a wider audience. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The markdown+Rknitr source code of this blog is available under a GNU General Public License (GPL v3) license from github. Introduction During the 2020 summer Tom Britton and I gave a course on The Mathematics and Statistics of Infectious Disease Outbreaks at the Department of Mathematics, Stockholm Un ..read more

Abstract: We attempt a mathematical description of the risk scoring algorithm used in the Google and Apple exposure notification framework (v1). This algorithm is used in many digital contact tracing apps for COVID-19, e.g., in Germany or Switzerland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The markdown+Rknitr source code of this blog is available under a GNU General Public License (GPL v3) license from github. Motivation My phone runs a digital COVID-19 contact tracing app based on the Apple and Google exposure notification (GAEN) fr ..read more

Abstract: We look at superspreading in infectious disease transmission from a statistical point of view. We characterise heterogeneity in the offspring distribution by the Gini coefficient instead of the usual dispersion parameter of the negative binomial distribution. This allows us to consider more flexible offspring distributions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The markdown+Rknitr source code of this blog is available under a GNU General Public License (GPL v3) license from github. Motivation The recent Science report on S ..read more