Evaluating undercounts in epidemics: Response to Maruotti et al. (2022)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Maruotti et al. 2022 used a mark-recapture approach to estimate bounds on the true number of monkeypox infections in various countries.We show that such approaches are fundamentally flawed.We argue on conceptual grounds that it is impossible to estimate undercounting based solely on a single stream of reported cases, supporting our contention by applying the authors' method to simulated epidemics.The simulations show that the proposed methods estimate bounds on the ascertainment ratio of ≈ 0.2 -0.5 roughly independently of the true ascertainment ratio.We conclude that the proposed mark-recapture approach should not be used to estimate undercounting or ascertainment ratios.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.093 | 0.356 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".