Related papers: Efficient identification of infected sub-populatio…
To make informative public policy decisions in battling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to know the disease prevalence in a population. There are two intertwined difficulties in estimating this prevalence based on testing…
Group testing was conceived during World War II to identify soldiers infected with syphilis using as few tests as possible, and it has attracted renewed interest during the COVID-19 pandemic. A long-standing assumption in the probabilistic…
To strengthen inferences meta analyses are commonly used to summarize information from a set of independent studies. In some cases, though, the data may not satisfy the assumptions underlying the meta analysis. Using three Bayesian methods…
In group testing, the task is to identify defective items by testing groups of them together using as few tests as possible. We consider the setting where each item is defective with a constant probability $\alpha$, independent of all other…
When the infection prevalence of a disease is low, Dorfman showed 80 years ago that testing groups of people can prove more efficient than testing people individually. Our goal in this paper is to propose new group testing algorithms that…
Testing is an important part of tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. Availability of testing is a bottleneck due to constrained resources and effective prioritization of individuals is necessary. Here, we discuss the impact of different…
A hypothesis testing and an interval estimation are studied for the common mean of several lognormal populations. Two methods are given based on the concept of generalized p-value and generalized confidence interval. These new methods are…
The time varying effective reproduction number is an important parameter for communication and policy decisions during an epidemic. In this paper, we present new statistical methods for estimating the reproduction number based on the…
COVID-19 has resulted in a global health crisis that may become even more acute over the upcoming months. One of the main reasons behind the current rapid growth of COVID-19 in the U.S. population is the limited availability of testing kits…
Estimating prevalence, the fraction of a population with a certain medical condition, is fundamental to epidemiology. Traditional methods rely on classification of test samples taken at random from a population. Such approaches to…
Causal discovery can be a powerful tool for investigating causality when a system can be observed but is inaccessible to experiments in practice. Despite this, it is rarely used in any scientific or medical fields. One of the major hurdles…
Anomaly detection methods identify examples that do not follow the expected behaviour, typically in an unsupervised fashion, by assigning real-valued anomaly scores to the examples based on various heuristics. These scores need to be…
First Few X (FFX) studies collect household-stratified data in the early stages of a pandemic, in order to infer severity and transmissibility of an emerging disease. We present a Bayesian method to approximately infer population-level…
Measurement error is a common challenge for causal inference studies using electronic health record (EHR) data, where clinical outcomes and treatments are frequently mismeasured. Researchers often address measurement error by conducting…
Intuitively, unfamiliarity should lead to lack of confidence. In reality, current algorithms often make highly confident yet wrong predictions when faced with relevant but unfamiliar examples. A classifier we trained to recognize gender is…
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing is the gold standard for diagnosing COVID-19. PCR amplifies the virus DNA 40 times to produce measurements of viral loads that span seven orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, the outputs of these tests…
During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and lateral flow device (LFD) tests were frequently deployed to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2. Many of these tests were singleplex, and only tested for the presence of a…
In this study, we analyze the effectiveness of measures aimed at finding and isolating infected individuals to contain epidemics like COVID-19, as the suppression induced over the effective reproduction number. We develop a mathematical…
We consider the SIR model and study the first time the number of infected individuals begins to decrease and the first time this population is below a given threshold. We interpret these times as functions of the initial susceptible and…
In the group-testing literature, efficient algorithms have been developed to minimize the number of tests required to identify all minimal "defective" sub-groups embedded within a larger group, using deterministic group splitting with a…