Research Projects

A methodology by which an epidemiologist may arrive at an optimal design for a survey whose goal is to estimate the disease burden in a population. For serosurveys with a given budget of C rupees, a specified set of tests with costs, sensitivities, and specificities, shows the existence of optimal designs in four different contexts, including the well known c-optimal design. Usefulness of the results are illustrated via numerical examples. The results are applicable to a wide range of epidemiological surveys under the assumptions that the estimate’s Fisher-information matrix satisfies a uniform positive definite criterion.