Measures of disassortativeness and their application to directly transmitted infections

Abstract

We propose a measure of disassortativeness to summarize contact patterns relevant to the transmission of directly transmitted infections. We discuss the properties of this measure, describe standardization relative to homogeneous mixing, and generalize it to multivariate contact structures. We explore some of its properties and apply our methods to serological surveys of close contact infections and surveys of self-reported social contacts obtained in several European countries.