scholarly journals AutoSEIR: Accurate Forecasting from Real-time Epidemic Data Using Machine Learning

Author(s):  
Stefano Giovanni Rizzo ◽  
Giovanna Vantini ◽  
Mohamad Saad ◽  
Sanjay Chawla

Since the SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak has been recognized as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, several models have been proposed to forecast its evolution following the governments' interventions. In particular, the need for fine-grained predictions, based on real-time and fluctuating data, has highlighted the limitations of traditional SEIR models and parameter fitting, encouraging the study of new models for greater accuracy. In this paper we propose a novel approach to epidemiological parameter fitting and epidemic forecasting, based on an extended version of the SEIR compartmental model and on an auto-differentiation technique for partially observable ODEs (Ordinary Differential Equations). The results on publicly available data show that the proposed model is able to fit the daily cases curve with greater accuracy, obtaining also a lower forecast error. Furthermore, the forecast accuracy allows to predict the peak with an error margin of less than one week, up to 50 days before the peak happens.

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 593-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chi-Hé Elder ◽  
Michael Haugh

Abstract Dominant accounts of “speaker meaning” in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers can engage in a local process of meaning negotiation. In this paper, we take insights from interactional pragmatics to offer an empirically informed view on speaker meaning that incorporates both speakers’ and hearers’ perspectives, alongside a formalization of how to model speaker meanings in such a way that we can account for both understandings – the canonical cases – and misunderstandings, but critically, also the process of interactionally negotiating meanings between interlocutors. We highlight that utterance-level theories of meaning provide only a partial representation of speaker meaning as it is understood in interaction, and show that inferences about a given utterance at any given time are formally connected to prior and future inferences of participants. Our proposed model thus provides a more fine-grained account of how speakers converge on speaker meanings in real time, showing how such meanings are often subject to a joint endeavor of complex inferential work.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Klesen ◽  
Patrick Gebhard

In this paper we report about the use of computer generated affect to control body and mind of cognitively modeled virtual characters. We use the computational model of affect ALMA that is able to simulate three different affect types in real-time. The computation of affect is based on a novel approach of an appraisal language. Both the use of elements of the appraisal language and the simulation of different affect types has been evaluated. Affect is used to control facial expressions, facial complexions, affective animations, posture, and idle behavior on the body layer and the selection of dialogue strategies on the mind layer. To enable a fine-grained control of these aspects a Player Markup Language (PML) has been developed. The PML is player-independent and allows a sophisticated control of character actions coordinated by high-level temporal constraints. An Action Encoder module maps the output of ALMA to PML actions using affect display rules. These actions drive the real-time rendering of affect, gesture and speech parameters of virtual characters, which we call Virtual Humans. 


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Liu

Abstract Background: In a worldwide health crisis as severe as COVID-19, there has become a pressing need for rapid, reliable diagnostics. Currently, popular testing methods such as reversetranscription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) can have high false negative rates. Consequently, COVID-19 patients are not accurately identified nor treated quickly enough to prevent transmission of the virus. However, the recent rise of medical CT data has presented promising avenues, since CT manifestations contain key characteristics indicative of COVID-19. Findings: This study aimed to take a novel approach in the machine learning-based detection of COVID-19 from chest CT scans. First, the dataset utilized in this study was derived from three major sources, comprising a total of 17,698 chest CT slices across 923 patient cases. Additionally, image preprocessing algorithms were developed to reduce noise by excluding irrelevant features. Transfer learning was also implemented with the EfficientNetB7 pre-trained model to provide a backbone architecture and save computational resources. Lastly, several explainability techniques were leveraged to qualitatively validate model performance by localizing infected regions and highlighting fine-grained pixel details. The proposed model attained an overall accuracy of 92.71% and a sensitivity of 95.79%. Explainability measures showed that the model correctly distinguished between relevant, critical features pertaining to COVID-19 chest CT images and normal controls.Conclusions: Deep learning frameworks provide efficient, human-interpretable COVID-19 diagnostics that could complement a radiologist’s decision or serve as an alternative screening tool. Future endeavors could provide insight into infection severity, patient risk stratification, and more precise visualizations


1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (8-9) ◽  
pp. 19-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Norreys ◽  
Ian Cluckie

Conventional UDS models are mechanistic which though appropriate for design purposes are less well suited to real-time control because they are slow running, difficult to calibrate, difficult to re-calibrate in real time and have trouble handling noisy data. At Salford University a novel hybrid of dynamic and empirical modelling has been developed, to combine the speed of the empirical model with the ability to simulate complex and non-linear systems of the mechanistic/dynamic models. This paper details the ‘knowledge acquisition module’ software and how it has been applied to construct a model of a large urban drainage system. The paper goes on to detail how the model has been linked with real-time radar data inputs from the MARS c-band radar.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 1633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beom-Su Kim ◽  
Sangdae Kim ◽  
Kyong Hoon Kim ◽  
Tae-Eung Sung ◽  
Babar Shah ◽  
...  

Many applications are able to obtain enriched information by employing a wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) in industrial environments, which consists of nodes that are capable of processing multimedia data. However, as many aspects of WMSNs still need to be refined, this remains a potential research area. An efficient application needs the ability to capture and store the latest information about an object or event, which requires real-time multimedia data to be delivered to the sink timely. Motivated to achieve this goal, we developed a new adaptive QoS routing protocol based on the (m,k)-firm model. The proposed model processes captured information by employing a multimedia stream in the (m,k)-firm format. In addition, the model includes a new adaptive real-time protocol and traffic handling scheme to transmit event information by selecting the next hop according to the flow status as well as the requirement of the (m,k)-firm model. Different from the previous approach, two level adjustment in routing protocol and traffic management are able to increase the number of successful packets within the deadline as well as path setup schemes along the previous route is able to reduce the packet loss until a new path is established. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes are able to improve the stream dynamic success ratio and network lifetime compared to previous work by meeting the requirement of the (m,k)-firm model regardless of the amount of traffic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 711-738
Author(s):  
Phu Pham ◽  
Phuc Do

Link prediction on heterogeneous information network (HIN) is considered as a challenge problem due to the complexity and diversity in types of nodes and links. Currently, there are remained challenges of meta-path-based link prediction in HIN. Previous works of link prediction in HIN via network embedding approach are mainly focused on exploiting features of node rather than existing relations in forms of meta-paths between nodes. In fact, predicting the existence of new links between non-linked nodes is absolutely inconvincible. Moreover, recent HIN-based embedding models also lack of thorough evaluations on the topic similarity between text-based nodes along given meta-paths. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we proposed a novel approach of topic-driven multiple meta-path-based HIN representation learning framework, namely W-MMP2Vec. Our model leverages the quality of node representations by combining multiple meta-paths as well as calculating the topic similarity weight for each meta-path during the processes of network embedding learning in content-based HINs. To validate our approach, we apply W-TMP2Vec model in solving several link prediction tasks in both content-based and non-content-based HINs (DBLP, IMDB and BlogCatalog). The experimental outputs demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed model which outperforms recent state-of-the-art HIN representation learning models.


Author(s):  
Brij B. Gupta ◽  
Krishna Yadav ◽  
Imran Razzak ◽  
Konstantinos Psannis ◽  
Arcangelo Castiglione ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Aysu Melis Buyuk ◽  
Gul T. Temur

In line with the increase in consciousness on sustainability in today’s global world, great emphasis has been attached to food waste management. Food waste is a complex issue to manage due to uncertainties on quality, quantity, location, and time of wastes, and it involves different decisions at many stages from seed to post-consumption. These ambiguities re-quire that some decisions should be handled in a linguistic and ambiguous environment. That forces researchers to benefit from fuzzy sets mostly utilized to deal with subjectivity that causes uncertainty. In this study, as a novel approach, the spherical fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (SFAHP) was used to select the best food treatment option. In the model, four main criteria (infrastructural, governmental, economic, and environmental) and their thirteen sub-criteria are considered. A real case is conducted to show how the proposed model can be used to assess four food waste treatment options (composting, anaerobic digestion, landfilling, and incineration). Also, a sensitivity analysis is generated to check whether the evaluations on the main criteria can change the results or not. The proposed model aims to create a subsidiary tool for decision makers in relevant companies and institutions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 2083
Author(s):  
Jia Xie ◽  
Zhu Wang ◽  
Zhiwen Yu ◽  
Bin Guo ◽  
Xingshe Zhou

Ischemic stroke is one of the typical chronic diseases caused by the degeneration of the neural system, which usually leads to great damages to human beings and reduces life quality significantly. Thereby, it is crucial to extract useful predictors from physiological signals, and further diagnose or predict ischemic stroke when there are no apparent symptoms. Specifically, in this study, we put forward a novel prediction method by exploring sleep related features. First, to characterize the pattern of ischemic stroke accurately, we extract a set of effective features from several aspects, including clinical features, fine-grained sleep structure-related features and electroencephalogram-related features. Second, a two-step prediction model is designed, which combines commonly used classifiers and a data filter model together to optimize the prediction result. We evaluate the framework using a real polysomnogram dataset that contains 20 stroke patients and 159 healthy individuals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can predict stroke events effectively, and the Precision, Recall, Precision Recall Curve and Area Under the Curve are 63%, 85%, 0.773 and 0.919, respectively.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document