Related papers: Hijacking Malaria Simulators with Probabilistic Pr…
We develop a simulation tool to support policy-decisions about healthcare for chronic diseases in defined populations. Incident disease-cases are generated in-silico from an age-sex characterised general population using standard…
Plasmodium falciparum malaria still poses one of the greatest threats to human life with over 200 million cases globally leading to half-million deaths annually. Of these, 90% of cases and of the mortality occurs in sub-Saharan Africa,…
Malaria can be prevented, diagnosed, and treated; however, every year, there are more than 200 million cases and 200.000 preventable deaths. Malaria remains a pressing public health concern in low- and middle-income countries, especially in…
Epidemiological models are an important tool in coping with epidemics, as they offer a forecast, even if often simplistic, of the behavior of the disease in the population. This allows responsible health agencies to organize themselves and…
A probabilistic approach to the epidemic evolution on realistic social-contact networks allows for characteristic differences among subjects, including the individual number and structure of social contacts, and the heterogeneity of the…
This paper introduces the probabilistic module interface, which allows encapsulation of complex probabilistic models with latent variables alongside custom stochastic approximate inference machinery, and provides a platform-agnostic…
We introduce a new method for inference in stochastic epidemic models which uses recursive multinomial approximations to integrate over unobserved variables and thus circumvent likelihood intractability. The method is applicable to a class…
Since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have applied restrictions in order to slow down its spreading. However, creating such policies is hard, especially because the government needs to trade-off the spreading of the…
Many theoretical works and tools on epidemiological field reflect the emphasis on decision-making Tools by both public health and the scientific community, which continues to increase. Indeed, in the epidemiological field, modeling tools…
Epidemiologists have a growing interest in employing computational approaches to solve analytic problems, with simulation being arguably the most accessible among all approaches. While previous literature discussed the utility of simulation…
We describe a framework for inducing probabilistic grammars from corpora of positive samples. First, samples are {\em incorporated} by adding ad-hoc rules to a working grammar; subsequently, elements of the model (such as states or…
Compartmental epidemic models have been widely used for predicting the course of epidemics, from estimating the basic reproduction number to guiding intervention policies. Studies commonly acknowledge these models' assumptions but less…
Monte Carlo inference has asymptotic guarantees, but can be slow when using generic proposals. Handcrafted proposals that rely on user knowledge about the posterior distribution can be efficient, but are difficult to derive and implement.…
A key problem in modelling the evolution dynamics of infectious diseases is the mathematical representation of the mechanism of transmission of the contagion. Models with a finite number of subpopulations can be described via systems of…
We tackle limitations of ordinary differential equation-driven Susceptible-Infections-Removed (SIR) models and their extensions that have recently be employed for epidemic nowcasting and forecasting. In particular, we deal with challenges…
In Part 1, we introduced a stochastic model of an infectious disease, based on the BDI (birth and death with immigration) process. We showed that random processes defined by this model can capture the essence of the stochastic, often…
Inference of the reproduction number through time is of vital importance during an epidemic outbreak. Typically, epidemiologists tackle this using observed prevalence or incidence data. However, prevalence and incidence data alone is often…
Disaggregation modelling is a method of predicting disease risk at high resolution using aggregated response data. High resolution disease mapping is an important public health tool to aid the optimisation of resources, and is commonly used…
We present a novel probabilistic programming framework that couples directly to existing large-scale simulators through a cross-platform probabilistic execution protocol, which allows general-purpose inference engines to record and control…
gemlib is a Python library for defining, simulating, and calibrating Markov state-transition models. Stochastic models are often computationally intensive, making them impractical to use in pandemic response efforts despite their favourable…