  We present the R package SimInf which provides an efficient and very flexible
framework to conduct data-driven epidemiological modeling in realistic large
scale disease spread simulations. The framework integrates infection dynamics
in subpopulations as continuous-time Markov chains using the Gillespie
stochastic simulation algorithm and incorporates available data such as births,
deaths and movements as scheduled events at predefined time-points. Using C
code for the numerical solvers and OpenMP to divide work over multiple
processors ensures high performance when simulating a sample outcome. One of
our design goal was to make SimInf extendable and enable usage of the numerical
solvers from other R extension packages in order to facilitate complex
epidemiological research. In this paper, we provide a technical description of
the framework and demonstrate its use on some basic examples. We also discuss
how to specify and extend the framework with user-defined models.
