Statistical Deconvolution for Inference of Infection Time Series

Accurate measurement of daily infection incidence is crucial to epidemic response. However, delays in symptom onset, testing, and reporting obscure the dynamics of transmission, necessitating methods to remove the effects of stochastic delays from observed data. Existing estimators can be sensitive to model misspecification and censored observations; many analysts have instead used methods that exhibit strong bias. We develop an estimator with a regularization scheme to cope with stochastic delays, which we term the robust incidence deconvolution estimator. We compare the method to existing…