Fig. 9.

Sub-epidemic profiles of the epidemic wave forecasts for the plague epidemic in Madagascar displayed in Fig. 8. The epidemic wave model predicts a “traveling wave” composed of asynchronous sub-epidemics when the model is fitted to the weekly incidence just before or around the epidemic peak. Once the declining phase of the epidemic is apparent, the model predicts a slowly declining tail of the epidemic wave with some relatively mild oscillations. Black circles correspond to the data points. Different colors represent different sub-epidemics of the epidemic wave profile. The vertical line indicates the start time of the forecast