A decision model and methodology for the AIDS epidemic

摘要

A study by Kaplan [18] is, to our knowledge, the first to put an avowed AIDS model into an intervention setting. Specifically, consequences of programs for reducing the frequency of new partner selection and effects of partially-effective immunization are viewed by numerical studies, with the parameter choice motivated by data from the San Francisco epidemic. The present work places Kaplan's model into a stochastic time series setting, and costs are assigned to intervention and to caring for AIDS victims. An optimization scheme for solving the resulting decision problem is analyzed and also is illustrated computationally by application to the San Francisco data.