Constructing Contact and Connectivity Matrices for Infectious Disease Modelling

Contact (or mixing, or more generally connectivity) matrices are a fundamental component of modelling and inference for infectious disease epidemiology. Their structure and parametrisation directly accounts for the frequency of interactions between different subpopulations of individuals, as well as having the potential to encode dynamic heterogeneity in these interactions across demographic axes, space and time. Considerable research has been devoted to the structure and estimation of (components of) these matrices to help inform outbreak control and forecast disease spread. In this paper, we review the existing literature on the data types used to construct contact matrices and the methods for incorporating uncertainties and heterogeneities into them. We also highlight remaining challenges and future directions in the use of these contact matrices for epidemiological research.