[Population Modeling] The SILAS-model

[Stefan Scholz]

Dear all,

thank you very much for your invitation to the mailing list and the 
opportunity to exchange ideas and knowledge about modeling! My name is 
Stefan Scholz and I am working at the Department of Health Economics and 
Management at the University of Bielefeld.

Here you can find a webpage/blog about the SILAS-model 
(abmsyphilis.wordpress.com 
<cid:part1.05050003.00020709 at uni-bielefeld.de>), which aims to simulate 
*S*exual *I*nfections as *L*arge-scale *A*gent-based *S*imulation. 
Basically, SILAS is a demographic model which explicitly simulates 
sexual contacts of hetero-, homo- and bisexual agents in relationships 
and for singles on a daily basis. The birth of a new agent is thereby 
initiated by an unprotected (pill, condom) sexual contact between 
heterosexual agents respecting induced and spontaneous abortion. STIs 
can also be spread among the agents via those sexual contacts. Agents 
are already forming small family networks and reproduce themselves close 
to the level of the general German population without any externally 
given fertility rate. It is planned to extend the model to a regional 
distribution of the agents and other social networks to simulate the 
regional spread of diseases and other (non-STI) infectious diseases, 
respectively.
The model is built in the FLAME-framework (http://www.flame.ac.uk/) 
which combines C-code and XML-files to enable agent interaction via the 
X-machine framework. SILAS is of stochastic nature, as each agent 
calculates probability distributions in dependence to its 
characteristics (age, sex, sexual orientation, etc.) from which it 
samples its behavior. The behavior rules are estimated from a large 
panel-data set using the GAMLSS-package in R (http://www.gamlss.org/). 
It is also planned in the medium-term to migrate the model to an 
AmazonWebServices-server to scale the model size. (Does anyone have 
experiences with AWS?)

Unfortunately, I have no publications related to the SILAS-model so far, 
but I hope you can find most of the information about the model on the 
above blog. I submitted two abstracts to the International Conference of 
Computational Social Sciences in Helsinki. Could you maybe use them as 
reference, presupposed they will be accepted? If I can help you or 
contribute in any other way, please let me know!

Again, thank you very much for the invitation and I am really looking 
forward to future discussions!

Best regards,
Stefan
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