“…The advantage of the agent– based approach is that household structure and subject–level covariates may be incorporated into the model (Auranen et al, 2000, Höhle and Jørgensen, 2002, Cauchemez et al, 2004, Neal and Roberts, 2004, O’Neill, 2009). Development of DA methods for SEMs is of continuing interest, and recent works by Pooley et al (2015), Qin and Shelton (2015), and Shestopaloff and Neal (2016) have presented methods that could possibly be applied to epidemic count data. However, their algorithms forgo the flexibility of agent–based DA, and in the case of the latter two papers have not been applied to SEMs.…”