Short answer: yes, the underlying black-box fast multipole method will be very accurate with just a small number of Chebyshev coefficients. The main requirement is the kernel is reasonably smooth away from the origin.
Here's a toy example, 100 sources and points over a 10x10 square and a 1/(1 + d^2) kernel:
Exactly which kernel to use for disease transmission is an open question, but IIRC the Imperial model used something like 1/(1 + d^(3/2)) based on fits to data.
Comments
Short answer: yes, the underlying black-box fast multipole method will be very accurate with just a small number of Chebyshev coefficients. The main requirement is the kernel is reasonably smooth away from the origin.
Here's a toy example, 100 sources and points over a 10x10 square and a 1/(1 + d^2) kernel:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1F5rGIPxI8RI9tYJ4RSv...
Here, it gets 1e-8 residual variance.
Exactly which kernel to use for disease transmission is an open question, but IIRC the Imperial model used something like 1/(1 + d^(3/2)) based on fits to data.