World Malaria Report and MCMC

OMG I have got busy. I went to NIPS and the weekend disappeared and now it’s post-doc interview season again, already! So much to say, but I plan to pace myself. For this short post, an exciting announcement that my model of the insecticide treated mosquito net distribution supply chain was used in the WHO 2010 World Malaria Report, which just came out. Since it is a Bayesian statistical model that draws samples from a posterior distribution with MCMC, it’s really nice that the report includes some of the uncertainty intervals around the coverage estimates. Guess what? There is a lot of uncertainty. But nets are getting to households and getting used. Pages 19 and 20 in Chapter 4 have the results of our hard work.