THE CHAIN MULTINOMIAL MODELS OF THE HIV EPIDEMIOLOGY IN HOMOSEXUAL POPULATIONS

In this paper, we propose a general class of stochastic models for the HIV epidemic in homosexual populations. This class of models are refe rred to as chain multinomial models. We illustrate this class of model s by assuming some stochastic models of the HIV epidemic in homosexual populations in Sections 2-4 and derive the means, the variances and t he covariances; we also derive results for the mean behaviors of these models. It is shown that under proportional mixing, the mean behavior s and the trend of these models are quite similar to one another; yet the variances and covariances of the infective people and AIDS cases o f these models are very different over different models. These results suggest that the infection duration of infective people and sexual ac tivity levels have significant impact on the projection of HIV epidemi c.