Roberts, Carole with Brian Dangerfield, "System Dynamics and Statistics: Recovering the Aids Incubation Time Distribution from Right-Censored Data", 1991
ua435
The identification of the AIDS incubation time distribution, together with its parameters, is a vital component of any mathematical model designed to portray cases. A dataset on Transfusion-Associated AIDS cases in the USA is available and can be utilised in this identification process. However, the task of achieving a best fit using either parametric or non-parametric statistical methods is hampered because, in particular, the data are right-censored and this leads to an extremely complex maximum, likelihood estimation procedure. By employing an appropriate system dynamics software tool an optimising simulation approach to the fitting process is available as an alternative. This enables the resolution of a number of complications which hamper the maximum likelihood approach.