Related papers: Hijacking Malaria Simulators with Probabilistic Pr…
This paper examines some methods and ideas underlying the author's successful probabilistic learning systems(PLS), which have proven uniquely effective and efficient in generalization learning or induction. While the emerging principles are…
Modelling epidemics via classical population-based models suffers from shortcomings that so-called individual-based models are able to overcome, as they are able to take heterogeneity features into account, such as super-spreaders, and…
This paper introduces a simulation algorithm for evaluating the log-likelihood function of a large supermodular binary-action game. Covered examples include (certain types of) peer effect, technology adoption, strategic network formation,…
The recently proposed generalized epidemic modeling framework (GEMF) \cite{sahneh2013generalized} lays the groundwork for systematically constructing a broad spectrum of stochastic spreading processes over complex networks. This article…
Machine learning algorithms can effectively classify malware through dynamic behavior but are susceptible to adversarial attacks. Existing attacks, however, often fail to find an effective solution in both the feature and problem spaces.…
This two-part paper presents a new approach to predictive analysis for social processes. In Part I, we begin by identifying a class of social processes which are simultaneously important in applications and difficult to predict using…
Recently, the world has witnessed the most severe pandemic (COVID-19) in this century. Studies on epidemic prediction and simulation have received increasing attention. However, the current methods suffer from three issues. First, most of…
Epidemics occur in all shapes and forms: infections propagating in our sparse sexual networks, rumours and diseases spreading through our much denser social interactions, or viruses circulating on the Internet. With the advent of large…
In this paper, we propose a model predictive control (MPC) method for real-time intervention of spreading processes, such as epidemics and wildfire, over large-scale networks. The goal is to allocate budgeted resources each time step to…
Group testing is a method of identifying infected patients by performing tests on a pool of specimens collected from patients. For the case in which the test returns a false result with finite probability, we propose Bayesian inference and…
This paper considers the problem of designing non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) strategies, such as masking and social distancing, to slow the spread of a viral epidemic. We formulate the problem of jointly minimizing the infection…
Missing data is a common problem in medical research, and is commonly addressed using multiple imputation. Although traditional imputation methods allow for valid statistical inference when data are missing at random (MAR), their…
Acceptance-rejection (AR), Independent Metropolis Hastings (IMH) or importance sampling (IS) Monte Carlo (MC) simulation algorithms all involve computing ratios of probability density functions (pdfs). On the other hand, classifiers…
We demonstrate an approach to replicate and forecast the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic using the toolkit of probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). Our goal is to study the impact of various modeling assumptions and…
Most epidemiologic cohorts are composed of volunteers who do not represent the general population. To enable population inference from cohorts, we and others have proposed utilizing probability survey samples as external references to…
Traditional compartmental models capture population-level dynamics but fail to characterize individual-level risk. The computational cost of exact likelihood evaluation for partially observed individual-based models, however, grows…
Probabilistic programming has emerged as a powerful paradigm in statistics, applied science, and machine learning: by decoupling modelling from inference, it promises to allow modellers to directly reason about the processes generating…
Inverse Ising inference allows pairwise interactions of complex binary systems to be reconstructed from empirical correlations. Typical estimators used for this inference, such as Pseudo-likelihood maximization (PLM), are biased. Using the…
Probabilistic programming languages rely fundamentally on some notion of sampling, and this is doubly true for probabilistic programming languages which perform Bayesian inference using Monte Carlo techniques. Verifying samplers - proving…
Malaria is an infectious disease affecting a large population across the world, and interventions need to be efficiently applied to reduce the burden of malaria. We develop a framework to help policy-makers decide how to allocate limited…