Abstract
Background
Exposure-history data collected during epidemics or pandemics within digital contact-tracing applications hold immense potential for rapid, scalable epidemiological inference. The sensitivity of these data makes privacy-preserving designs essential to secure public trust and app uptake. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, such approaches were not yet available at the scale or maturity required for deployment. We present a Bayesian decentralised framework to infer transmission dynamics from exposure-history data while protecting user privacy.
Methods
Our approach is based on iterative communication between user devices and a central server, computing log-likelihood gradients on device from exposure-history data and centrally updating parameter values using only aggregated gradients. Applying this framework to synthetic exposure-history data from a hypothetical respiratory pathogen epidemic simulated on dynamic contact networks, we assessed its ability to estimate the underlying transmission parameters, perform infector attribution, and reconstruct serial-interval (SI) distributions. We systematically explored how inference was affected by incomplete exposure-history data arising from partial app adoption, case under-ascertainment, and incomplete exposure logging, and by transmission scenarios.
Findings
Our decentralised framework accurately recovered transmission parameters, closely matching estimates derived from centralised data with no systematic bias in posterior means. Parameter recovery remained robust when hazards from unobserved exposures were known as a daily average across the population. Although incomplete exposure-history data and specific transmission scenarios introduced compensatory parameter biases, the inferred host infectiousness profile retained sufficient accuracy, and the weekly SI distributions reconstructed from infector attributions closely resembled the ground-truth distributions.
Interpretation
Our findings highlight that, beyond its primary role as a control measure, digital contact tracing could help characterise transmission dynamics almost in real time and inform public health interventions while preserving user privacy.
Funding Oxford Martin School Programme on Digital Pandemic Preparedness; National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit in Emerging and Zoonotic Infections.