The function ‘hhh4’ in the R-package ‘surveillance’

This document gives an introduction to the use of the function hhh4 for modelling univariate and multivariate time series of infectious disease counts. The function is part of the R-package surveillance, which provides tools for the visualization, modelling and monitoring of surveillance time series. The basic functionality of surveillance is introduced in the package vignette (Höhle et al., 2007) and in Höhle (2007) with main focus on outbreak detection methods. The following illustrates the use of hhh4 as estimation and prediction routine for the modelling framework proposed by Held et al. (2005), and extended in Paul et al. (2008), Paul and Held (2011) and Herzog et al. (2011).