Related papers: Proximity Ascertainment Bias in Early Covid Case L…
In a short text published as Letter to the Editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Weissman (2024) argues that the finding that early COVID-19 cases without an ascertained link to Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale…
In a recent prominent study Worobey et al.\ (2022, Science, 377, pp.\ 951--9) purported to demonstrate statistically that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the epicenter of the early COVID-19 epidemic. We show that this statistical…
The centrality of Wuhan's Huanan market in maps of December 2019 COVID-19 case residential locations, established by Worobey et al. (2022a), has recently been challenged by Stoyan and Chiu (2024, SC2024). SC2024 proposed a statistical test…
Access to healthy food is key to maintaining a healthy lifestyle and can be quantified by the distance to the nearest grocery store. However, calculating this distance forces a trade-off between cost and correctness. Accurate route-based…
While COVID-19 is rapidly propagating around the globe, the need for providing real-time forecasts of the epidemics pushes fits of dynamical and statistical models to available data beyond their capabilities. Here we focus on statistical…
In light of the outbreak of COVID-19, analyzing and measuring human mobility has become increasingly important. A wide range of studies have explored spatiotemporal trends over time, examined associations with other variables, evaluated…
In designed experiments and surveys, known laws or design feat ures provide checks on the most relevant aspects of a model and identify the target parameters. In contrast, in most observational studies in the health and social sciences, the…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, built environments in dense urban settings become major sources of infection. This study tests the difference of demographics and surrounding built environments across high-, medium- and low-infection…
Recently, sound-based COVID-19 detection studies have shown great promise to achieve scalable and prompt digital pre-screening. However, there are still two unsolved issues hindering the practice. First, collected datasets for model…
Compartmental models are widely adopted to describe and predict the spreading of infectious diseases. The unknown parameters of such models need to be estimated from the data. Furthermore, when some of the model variables are not…
A recent cluster trial in Bangladesh randomized 600 villages into 300 treatment/control pairs, to evaluate the impact of an intervention to increase mask-wearing. Data was analyzed in a generalized linear model and significance asserted…
We develop a Bayesian inference framework to quantify uncertainties in epidemiological models. We use SEIJR and SIJR models involving populations of susceptible, exposed, infective, diagnosed, dead and recovered individuals to infer from…
We consider a patient risk models which has access to patient features such as vital signs, lab values, and prior history but does not have access to a patient's diagnosis. For example, this occurs in a model deployed at intake time for…
COVID-19 has disrupted the global economy and well-being of people at an unprecedented scale and magnitude. To contain the disease, an effective early warning system that predicts the locations of outbreaks is of crucial importance. Studies…
Unfair predictions of machine learning (ML) models impede their broad acceptance in real-world settings. Tackling this arduous challenge first necessitates defining what it means for an ML model to be fair. This has been addressed by the ML…
The relative case fatality rates (CFRs) between groups and countries are key measures of relative risk that guide policy decisions regarding scarce medical resource allocation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In the middle of an active…
In an online prediction market, forecasters who could not see the current state of the market until they made their own separate estimates moved their estimates closer to the market forecast when the current state of the market became…
Equivariant models leverage prior knowledge on symmetries to improve predictive performance, but misspecified architectural constraints can harm it instead. While work has explored learning or relaxing constraints, selecting among…
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has quickly grown from a regional outbreak in Wuhan, China to a global pandemic. Early estimates of the epidemic growth and incubation period of COVID-19 may have been biased due to sample selection.…
Many events and policies (treatments) occur at specific spatial locations, with researchers interested in their effects on nearby units. I approach the spatial treatment setting from an experimental perspective: What ideal experiment would…