Principal Investigator

N   Becker Nat Cen for Epidemiology and Pop Health, University Centres and Services, ANU

Project Title

Estimating Trends in HIV Incidence for Australian Women

Brief Description for General Publications

The work is concerned with a project funded by an NHMRC grant for which Prof Niels Becker, NCEPH, is the principal investigator and Dr. Zhengfeng Li is a team member. The aim of the project is to apply a newly developed method, using linked data on HIV and AIDS diagnoses, to reconstruct the infection curve and thereby estimate trends in HIV incidence for Australian women who were infected heterosexually. In mathematical terms, we are estimating curves and computing the precision of the estimated curves. The computations use an algorithm adapted from the EM-algorithm, by adding a smoothing step and a Newton-Raphson step.