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Transparency and Documentation in Simulations of
Infectious Disease Outbreaks: Towards Evidence-based
Public Health Decisions and Communications
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Joakim Ekberg
Toomas Timpka
Magnus Morin
Johan Jenvald
James M. Nyce
Elin A. Gursky
Henrik Eriksson
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Computer simulations have emerged as important tools in
preparation for outbreaks of infectious disease. To support the collaborative
planning and responding to the outbreaks, reports from simulations need to be
transparent (accessible) with regard to the underlying parametric settings. This
paper presents a design for generation of simulation reports where the
background settings used in the simulation models are automatically visualized.
We extended the ontology-management system Protégé to tag different settings
into categories, and included these in report generation in parallel to the
simulation outcomes. The report generator takes advantage of an XSLT
specification and collects the documentation for the particular simulation
settings into abridged XMLs with summarized results and settings. We
conclude that even though inclusion of critical background settings in reports
may not increase the accuracy of infectious disease simulations, it can prevent
misunderstandings and less than optimal public-health decisions.
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