Visualizing results from infection transmission models: a case against "confidence intervals".

Stochastic transmission models are highly important in infectious disease epidemiology. The quantity of data produced by these models is challenging to display and communicate. A common approach is to display the model results in the familiar form of a mean or median and 95% interval, plotted over time. This approach has drawbacks, however, including the potential for ambiguity and misinterpretation of model results. Instead, we propose 2 alternative approaches for visualizing results from stochastic models. These proposed approaches convey the information provided by the median and 95% interval, as well as information about unexpected outcomes that may be of particular interest for stochastic epidemic models.