Related papers: Hijacking Malaria Simulators with Probabilistic Pr…
Epidemiological models have tremendous potential to forecast disease burden and quantify the impact of interventions. Detailed models are increasingly popular, however these models tend to be stochastic and very costly to evaluate.…
Health-policy planning requires evidence on the burden that epidemics place on healthcare systems. Multiple, often dependent, datasets provide a noisy and fragmented signal from the unobserved epidemic process including transmission and…
Probabilistic models for infectious disease dynamics are useful for understanding the mechanism underlying the spread of infection. When the likelihood function for these models is expensive to evaluate, traditional likelihood-based…
The United Nations (UN) issued official probabilistic population projections for all countries to 2100 in July 2015. This was done by simulating future levels of total fertility and life expectancy from Bayesian hierarchical models, and…
The main aim to build models capable of simulating the spreading of infectious diseases is to control them. And along this way, the key to find the optimal strategy for disease control is to obtain a large number of simulations of disease…
Constructing lineages of malware is an important cyber-defense task. Performing this task is difficult, however, due to the amount of malware data and obfuscation techniques by the authors. In this work, we formulate the lineage task as a…
This article focuses, in the context of epidemic models, on rare events that may possibly correspond to crisis situations from the perspective of Public Health. In general, no close analytic form for their occurrence probabilities is…
Agent-based simulators (ABS) are a popular epidemiological modelling tool to study the impact of various non-pharmaceutical interventions in managing an epidemic in a city (or a region). They provide the flexibility to accurately model a…
In this paper, we study a novel control method for a generalized SIS epidemic process. In particular, we use predictive control to design optimal protective resource distribution strategies which balance the need to eliminate the epidemic…
Inferring how an epidemic will progress and what actions to take when presented with limited information is of critical importance for epidemiologists and health professionals. In real world settings, epidemiology data can be scarce or…
Background: The global spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic has clearly shown the importance of considering the long-range transportation networks in the understanding of emerging diseases outbreaks. The…
Our paper deals with inferring simulator-based statistical models given some observed data. A simulator-based model is a parametrized mechanism which specifies how data are generated. It is thus also referred to as generative model. We…
We consider the problem of Bayesian inference in the family of probabilistic models implicitly defined by stochastic generative models of data. In scientific fields ranging from population biology to cosmology, low-level mechanistic…
Epidemic models are always simplifications of real world epidemics. Which real world features to include, and which simplifications to make, depend both on the disease of interest and on the purpose of the modelling. In the present paper we…
Computationally expensive simulators, implementing mathematical models in computer codes, are commonly approximated using statistical emulators. We develop and assess novel emulation methods for systems best modelled via a chain, series or…
Epidemiologists use a variety of statistical algorithms for the early detection of outbreaks. The practical usefulness of such methods highly depends on the trade-off between the detection rate of outbreaks and the chances of raising a…
Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) are receiving widespread attention for performing Bayesian inference in complex generative models. However, applications to science remain limited because of the impracticability of rewriting…
In this paper, we introduce a new method called SPSC (Simulation, Partitioning, Selection, Cloning) to estimate efficiently the probability of possible solutions in stochastic simulations. This method can be applied to any type of…
Spreadsheet workbook contents are simple programs. Because of this, probabilistic programming techniques can be used to perform Bayesian inversion of spreadsheet computations. What is more, existing execution engines in spreadsheet…
It is estimated that around 80\% of the world's population live in areas susceptible to at-least one major vector borne disease, and approximately 20% of global communicable diseases are spread by mosquitoes. Furthermore, the outbreaks of…