GEM: translational software for outbreak analysis

Recent developments in quantitative outbreak analysis are difficult to implement without specific software tools. Code is implemented from scratch for different disease applications, which is labour-intensive and error-prone and puts state-of-the-art analysis out of reach of many epidemiologists and students. Consequently, research into epidemics lacks the agility of subjects that have standardised software.

Generalised epidemic modelling (GEM) will be a prototype software package that gives epidemiologists access to cutting-edge statistical techniques in epidemic modelling. GEM will have a flexible and intuitive high-level language for expressing epidemic models, which may be passed to tested analysis algorithms. The package will allow researchers to concentrate on designing epidemic models and assessing their fitness for purpose. 

GEM will enable epidemic models to be built rapidly, run reproducibly against real-world data and be shared transparently. It will accelerate epidemiologists' capacity to respond to new outbreaks quickly, providing clear and reliable quantitative advice on disease management.