[Mathmajors] Undergraduate Math Sciences Seminar: this week's talk

[Julie Martinson]

Date:  Thursday April 5, 2007

Time:  12:30-1:50 pm in More Hall 230

Speaker: Marloes Maathuis, UW Statistics Department

Title:
Estimating the distribution of the incubation period of HIV/AIDS

Abstract:
The incubation period of HIV/AIDS is the period between the time of HIV
infection and the onset of the disease AIDS. Knowledge of the distribution
of the incubation period is important for predicting the future course of
the HIV/AIDS epidemic. However, it is difficult to estimate this
distribution, since we often don't know exactly when someone got infected
with HIV, and sometimes we also don't know when someone developed AIDS. So
we have little information about the incubation period. We will discuss
nonparametric statistical methods for this problem, and apply these
techniques to data from the Amsterdam Cohort Study of injecting drug
users.