Machine Learning-Powered Mitigation Policy Optimization in Epidemiological Models

A crucial aspect of managing a public health crisis is to effectively balance prevention and mitigation strategies, while taking their socio-economic impact into account. In particular, determining the influence of different non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on the effective use of public resources is an important problem, given the uncertainties on when a vaccine will be made available. In this paper, we propose a new approach for obtaining optimal policy recommendations based on epidemiological models, which can characterize the disease progression under different interventions, and a look-ahead reward optimization strategy to choose the suitable NPI at different stages of an epidemic. Given the time delay inherent in any epidemiological model and the exponential nature especially of an unmanaged epidemic, we find that such a look-ahead strategy infers non-trivial policies that adhere well to the constraints specified. Using two different epidemiological models, namely SEIR and EpiCast, we evaluate the proposed algorithm to determine the optimal NPI policy, under a constraint on the number of daily new cases and the primary reward being the absence of restrictions.

Accurate Calibration of Agent-based Epidemiological Models with Neural Network Surrogates

Calibrating complex epidemiological models to observed data is a crucial step to provide both insights into the current disease dynamics, i.e.\ by estimating a reproductive number, as well as to provide reliable forecasts and scenario explorations. Here we present a new approach to calibrate an agent-based model -- EpiCast -- using a large set of simulation ensembles for different major metropolitan areas of the United States. In particular, we propose: a new neural network based surrogate model able to simultaneously emulate all different locations; and a novel posterior estimation that provides not only more accurate posterior estimates of all parameters but enables the joint fitting of global parameters across regions.