Alternative CWD transmission models used to estimate infection coefficients (<i>β</i>) and time since disease introduction (<i>TDI</i>) of chronic wasting disease in white-tailed deer from south-central Wisconsin during the 2002–2010 harvest seasons.

aAkaike weight [41] for second best model was <0.01, while other models had support near zero. bNumber of model parameters. cFor the scaling coefficient ε of the non-linear model structure, the MLE was 0.94 with 95% CI of 0.23 to 1.0. We used Quasi-likelihood Akaike Information Criterion (QAIC) for model comparison, with the best model having a QAIC of 223.11 and Akaike weight = 0.99a. These models evaluate transmission modes including density-dependent (DD), frequency-dependent (FD), and non-linear transmission (NL) as a function of sex specificity. Estimated parameters include 95% confidence intervals.