Characterization of Partially Observed Epidemics Through Bayesian Inference - Application to COVID-19 Forecasts.
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Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Ray, Jaideep.
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We demonstrate a Bayesian method for the "real-time'" characterization and forecasting of partially observed COVID-19 epidemic. Characterization is the estimation of infection spread parameters using daily counts of symptomatic patients.The method is designed to help guide medical resource allocation in the early epoch of the outbreak. The estimation problem is posed as one of Bayesian inference and solved using a Markov chain Monte Carlo technique. The data used in this study was sourced before the arrival of the second wave of infection in July 2020. The proposed modeling approach, when applied at the country level, generally provides accurate forecasts at the regional, state and country level. The epidemiological model detected the flattening of the curve in California, after public health measures were instituted.The method also detected different disease dynamics when applied to specific region of New Mexico
In this report we investigate the utility of one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) models in epidemiological forecasting. Deep learning models, especially variants of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been studied for influenza forecasting, and have achieved higher forecasting skill compared to conventional models such as ARIMA models. In this study, we adapt two neural networks that employ one-dimensional temporal convolutional layers as a primary building block temporal convolutional networks and simple neural attentive meta-learner for epidemiological forecasting and test them with influenza data from the US collected over 2010-2019. We find that epidemiological forecasting with CNNs is feasible, and their forecasting skill is comparable to, and at times, superior to, RNNs. Thus CNNs and RNNs bring the power of nonlinear transformations to purely data-driven epidemiological models, a capability that heretofore has been limited to more elaborate mechanistic/compartmental disease models.
In this report, we construct and test a framework for fusing the predictions of a ensemble of seismic wave detectors. The framework is drawn from multi-instance learning and is meant to improve the predictive skill of the ensemble beyond that of the individual detectors. We show how the framework allows the use of multiple features derived from the seismogram to detect seismic wave arrivals, as well as how it allows only the most informative features to be retained in the ensemble. The computational cost of the "ensembling" method is linear in the size of the ensemble, allowing a scalable method for monitoring multiple features/transformations of a seismogram. The framework is tested on teleseismic and regional p-wave arrivals at the IMS (International Monitoring System) station in Warramunga, NT, Australia and the PNSU station in University of Utah's monitoring network.
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This report documents a statistical method for the "real-time" characterization of partially observed epidemics. Observations consist of daily counts of symptomatic patients, diagnosed with the disease. Characterization, in this context, refers to estimation of epidemiological parameters that can be used to provide short-term forecasts of the ongoing epidemic, as well as to provide gross information for the time-dependent infection rate. The characterization problem is formulated as a Bayesian inverse problem, and is predicated on a model for the distribution of the incubation period. The model parameters are estimated as distributions using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, thus quantifying the uncertainty in the estimates. The method is applied to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, using data at the country, provincial (e.g., states) and regional (e.g. county) levels. The epidemiological model includes a stochastic component due to uncertainties in the incubation period. This model-form uncertainty is accommodated by a pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings MCMC sampler, which produces posterior distributions that reflect this uncertainty. We approximate the discrepancy between the data and the epidemiological model using Gaussian and negative binomial error models; the latter was motivated by the over-dispersed count data. For small daily counts we find the performance of the calibrated models to be similar for the two error models. For large daily counts the negative-binomial approximation is numerically unstable unlike the Gaussian error model. Application of the model at the country level (for the United States, Germany, Italy, etc.) generally provided accurate forecasts, as the data consisted of large counts which suppressed the day-to-day variations in the observations. Further, the bulk of the data is sourced over the duration before the relaxation of the curbs on population mixing, and is not confounded by any discernible country-wide second wave of infections. At the state-level, where reporting was poor or which evinced few infections (e.g., New Mexico), the variance in the data posed some, though not insurmountable, difficulties, and forecasts were able to capture the data with large uncertainty bounds. The method was found to be sufficiently sensitive to discern the flattening of the infection and epidemic curve due to shelter-in-place orders after around 90% quantile for the incubation distribution (about 10 days for COVID-19). The proposed model was also used at a regional level to compare the forecasts for the central and north-west regions of New Mexico. Modeling the data for these regions illustrated different disease spread dynamics captured by the model. While in the central region the daily counts peaked in the late April, in the north-west region the ramp-up continued for approximately three more weeks.
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This manuscript comprises the final report for the 1-year, FY19 LDRD project "Rigorous Data Fusion for Computationally Expensive Simulations," wherein an alternative approach to Bayesian calibration was developed based a new sampling technique called VoroSpokes. Vorospokes is a novel quadrature and sampling framework defined with respect to Voronoi tessellations of bounded domains in $R^d$ developed within this project. In this work, we first establish local quadrature and sampling results on convex polytopes using randomly directed rays, or spokes, to approximate the quantities of interest for a specified target function. A theoretical justification for both procedures is provided along with empirical results demonstrating the unbiased convergence in the resulting estimates/samples. The local quadrature and sampling procedures are then extended to global procedures defined on more general domains by applying the local results to the cells of a Voronoi tessellation covering the domain in consideration. We then demonstrate how the proposed global sampling procedure can be used to define a natural framework for adaptively constructing Voronoi Piecewise Surrogate (VPS) approximations based on local error estimates. Finally, we show that the adaptive VPS procedure can be used to form a surrogate model approximation to a specified, potentially unnormalized, density function, and that the global sampling procedure can be used to efficiently draw independent samples from the surrogate density in parallel. The performance of the resulting VoroSpokes sampling framework is assessed on a collection of Bayesian inference problems and is shown to provide highly accurate posterior predictions which align with the results obtained using traditional methods such as Gibbs sampling and random-walk Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Importantly, the proposed framework provides a foundation for performing Bayesian inference tasks which is entirely independent from the theory of Markov chains.
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We propose herein a probabilistic framework for assessing the consistency of an experimental dataset, i.e., whether the stated experimental conditions are consistent with the measurements provided. In case the dataset is inconsistent, our framework allows one to hypothesize and test sources of inconsistencies. This is crucial in model validation efforts. The framework relies on Bayesian inference to estimate experimental settings deemed uncertain, from measurements deemed accurate. The quality of the inferred variables is gauged by its ability to reproduce held-out experimental measurements. We test the correctness of the framework on three double-cone experiments conducted in the CUBRC Inc.'s LENS-I shock tunnel, which have also been numerically simulated successfully. Thereafter, we use the framework to investigate two double-cone experiments (executed in the LENS-XX shock tunnel) which have encountered difficulties when used in model validation exercises. We detect an inconsistency with one of the LENS-XX experiments. In addition, we hypothesize two causes for our inability to simulate LEXS-XX experiments accurately and test them using our framework. We find that there is no single cause that explains all the discrepancies between model predictions and experimental data, but different causes explain different discrepancies, to larger or smaller extent. We end by proposing that uncertainty quantification methods be used more widely to understand experiments and characterize facilities, and we cite three different methods to do so, the third of which we present in this paper.
In this study we investigate how an ensemble of disease models can be conditioned to observational data, in a bid to improve its predictive skill. We use the ensemble of influenza forecasting models gathered by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as the exemplar. This ensemble is used every year to forecast the annual influenza outbreak in the United States. The models constituting this ensemble draw on very different modeling assumptions and approximations and are a diverse collection of methods to approximate epidemiological dynamics. Currently, each models' predictions are accorded the same importance, or weight, when compiling the ensemble's forecast. We consider this equally-weighted ensemble as the baseline case which has to be improved upon. In this study, we explore whether an ensemble forecast can be improved by "conditioning" the ensemble to whatever observational data is available from the ongoing outbreak. "Conditioning" can imply according the ensemble's members different weights which evolve over time, or simply perform the forecast using the top k (equally-weighted) models. In the latter case, the composition of the "top-k-see of models evolves over time. This is called "model averaging" in statistics. We explore four methods to perform model-averaging, three of which are new. We find that the CDC ensemble responds best to the "top-k-models" approach to model-averaging. All the new MA methods perform better than the baseline equally-weighted ensemble. The four model-averaging methods treat the models as black-boxes and simply use their forecasts as inputs i.e., one does not need access to the models at all, but rather only their forecasts. The model-averaging approaches reviewed in this report thus form a general framework for model-averaging any model ensemble.