Individual- and pair-based models of epidemic spreading: Master equations and analysis of their forecasting capabilities

Epidemic models are crucial to understand how an infectious disease spreads in a population and to devise the best containment strategies. Compartmental models can provide a fine-grained description of the evolution of an epidemic when microscopic information on the network of contacts among individuals is available. However, coarser-grained descriptions prove also to be useful in many aspects. They allow to derive closed expressions for key...