Assessing the value of spatial components in a wastewater-informed epidemiological inference model

This project involved extending the existing wwinference model from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics to include spatial components. This extension of the model was added to their package to allow for the inclusion of spatial data in the model. The model was then used to analyze the impact of spatial positions of wastewater treatment plants on the model's forecast-ability. Simulations where done to generate data from a spatial and a non-spatial model which where fit to inference models that made different assumptions of correlation. Preliminary results show that the inclusion of spatial components does not have noticeable improvements. A manuscript is currently under preparation for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.