Agent-Based Modeling in Public Health

There has been an explosion of research applying agent-based modeling to the study of public health. This chapter presents a formal literature search, giving the reader a sense of the scale and scope of work in this area to date. It discusses agent-based models in three subfields where their use has been most prevalent in public health to date: infectious disease, obesity, and tobacco control. For each set of topics, the chapter focuses on illustrative articles that satisfy three conditions. First, each article presents the results of an original agent-based model, demonstrating the added value of such computational modeling for addressing research questions in public health. Second, they are all grounded in some way, either calibrating parameters based on empirical analysis of data or comparing outputs against observed patterns. Finally, the papers leverage a core strength of agent-based models and use this strength to explore the social drivers of infectious disease, obesity, and tobacco use.