Related papers: Towards a data-driven characterization of behavior…
Mobile phones provide a powerful sensing platform that researchers may adopt to understand proximity interactions among people and the diffusion, through these interactions, of diseases, behaviors, and opinions. However, it remains a…
Over the last ten years, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has organized an annual influenza forecasting challenge with the motivation that accurate probabilistic forecasts could improve situational awareness and yield…
Although extensive behavioral changes often exist between closely related animal species, our understanding of the genetic basis underlying the evolution of behavior has remained limited. Here, we propose a new framework to study behavioral…
Seasonal variation in environmental variables, and in rates of contact among individuals, are fundamental drivers of infectious disease dynamics. Unlike most periodically-forced physical systems, for which the precise pattern of forcing is…
Augmenting classical epidemiological models with information from the social sciences helps unveil the interplay between contagion dynamics and social responses. However, multidisciplinary integration of social analysis and epidemiological…
This paper presents a predictive model for Influenza-Like-Illness, based on Twitter traffic. We gather data from Twitter based on a set of keywords used in the Influenza wikipedia page, and perform feature selection over all words used in 3…
Background: Micro-blogging services such as Twitter offer the potential to crowdsource epidemics in real-time. However, Twitter posts ('tweets') are often ambiguous and reactive to media trends. In order to ground user messages in epidemic…
Early prediction of the prevalence of influenza reduces its impact. Various studies have been conducted to predict the number of influenza-infected people. However, these studies are not highly accurate especially in the distant future such…
Influence functions are commonly used to attribute model behavior to training documents. We explore the reverse: crafting training data that induces model behavior. Our framework, Infusion, uses scalable influence-function approximations to…
Causal influence measures for machine learnt classifiers shed light on the reasons behind classification, and aid in identifying influential input features and revealing their biases. However, such analyses involve evaluating the classifier…
Accurate and reliable predictions of infectious disease dynamics can be valuable to public health organizations that plan interventions to decrease or prevent disease transmission. A great variety of models have been developed for this…
Systems that exploit publicly available user generated content such as Twitter messages have been successful in tracking seasonal influenza. We developed a novel filtering method for Influenza-Like-Illnesses (ILI)-related messages using 587…
Understanding the environmental drivers of forest transpiration is critical for improving global predictions of water availability and ecosystem health. Due to many competing controls on plant water stress and ecosystem transpiration,…
We analyze repeated cross-sectional survey data collected by the Institute of Global Health Innovation, to characterize the perception and behavior of the Italian population during the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the period that spans…
Increased availability of epidemiological data, novel digital data streams, and the rise of powerful machine learning approaches have generated a surge of research activity on real-time epidemic forecast systems. In this paper, we propose…
We investigate how the properties of epidemic networks change depending on the availability of different types of data on a disease outbreak. This is achieved by introducing mathematical and computational methods that estimate the…
A pressing question resulting from global warming is how infectious diseases will be affected by climate change. Answering this question requires research into the effects of weather on the population dynamics of transmission and infection;…
Background: Human behavior shapes infectious disease dynamics, yet its integration into transmission models remains fragmented. Recent epidemics, particularly COVID-19, highlight the need for models capturing adaptation to perceived risk,…
Convenient access to observational data enables us to learn causal effects without randomized experiments. This research direction draws increasing attention in research areas such as economics, healthcare, and education. For example, we…
Human perception and behavior are affected by the situational context, in particular during social interactions. A recent study demonstrated that humans perceive visual stimuli differently depending on whether they do the task by themselves…