Related papers: Screening for an Infectious Disease as a Problem i…
Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes…
Intuitively, sampling is likely to be more efficient for prevalence estimation, if the cases (or positives) have a relatively higher representation in the sample than in the population. In case the virus is transmitted via personal…
Optimization is becoming increasingly common in scientific and engineering domains. Oftentimes, these problems involve various levels of stochasticity or uncertainty in generating proposed solutions. Therefore, optimization in these…
We study the problem of a policymaker who aims at taming the spread of an epidemic while minimizing its associated social costs. The main feature of our model lies in the fact that the disease's transmission rate is a diffusive stochastic…
We review the optimal control of systems modeling the dynamics of tuberculosis. Time dependent control functions are introduced in the mathematical models, representing strategies for the improvement of the treatment and cure of active…
We propose and analyse an optimal control problem where the control system is a mathematical model for tuberculosis that considers reinfection. The control functions represent the fraction of early latent and persistent latent individuals…
We approach the development of models and control strategies of susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic processes from the perspective of marked temporal point processes and stochastic optimal control of stochastic differential…
The screening testing is an effective tool to control the early spread of an infectious disease such as COVID-19. When the total testing capacity is limited, we aim to optimally allocate testing resources among n counties. We build a…
We study the problem usually referred to as group testing in the context of COVID-19. Given $n$ samples taken from patients, how should we select mixtures of samples to be tested, so as to maximize information and minimize the number of…
Early detection of person-to-person transmission of emerging infectious diseases such as avian influenza is crucial for containing pandemics. We developed a simple permutation test and its refined version for this purpose. A simulation…
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…
Thompson sampling is a heuristic algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem which has a long tradition in machine learning. The algorithm has a Bayesian spirit in the sense that it selects arms based on posterior samples of reward…
The spread of COVID-19 has been thwarted in most countries through non-pharmaceutical interventions. In particular, the most effective measures in this direction have been the stay-at-home and closure strategies of businesses and schools.…
The optimal allocation of vaccines to population subgroups over time is a challenging health care management problem. In the context of a pandemic, the interaction between vaccination policies adopted by multiple agents and the cooperation…
Integrating measurements and historical data can enhance control systems through learning-based techniques, but ensuring performance and safety is challenging. Robust model predictive control strategies, like stochastic model predictive…
We develop a statistical model for the testing of disease prevalence in a population. The model assumes a binary test result, positive or negative, but allows for biases in sample selection and both type I (false positive) and type II…
Optimal control under uncertainty is a prevailing challenge for many reasons. One of the critical difficulties lies in producing tractable solutions for the underlying stochastic optimization problem. We show how advanced approximate…
Repeated decision-making problems under uncertainty may arise in the health policy context, such as infectious disease control for COVID-19 and other epidemics. These problems may sometimes be effectively solved using Markov decision…
Thompson sampling (TS) is a Bayesian randomized exploration strategy that samples options (e.g., system parameters or control laws) from the current posterior and then applies the selected option that is optimal for a task, thereby…
Stochastic ordering among distributions has been considered in a variety of scenarios. Economic studies often involve research about the ordering of investment strategies or social welfare. However, as noted in the literature, stochastic…