Algorithmic discovery of dynamic models from infectious disease data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theoretical models are typically developed through a deductive process where a researcher formulates a system of dynamic equations from hypothesized mechanisms. Recent advances in algorithmic methods can discover dynamic models inductively-directly from data. Most previous research has tested these methods by rediscovering models from synthetic data generated by the already known model. Here we apply Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) to discover mechanistic equations for disease dynamics from case notification data for measles, chickenpox, and rubella. The discovered models provide a good qualitative fit to the observed dynamics for all three diseases, However, the SINDy chickenpox model appears to overfit the empirical data, and recovering qualitatively correct rubella dynamics requires using power spectral density in the goodness-of-fit criterion. When SINDy uses a library of second-order functions, the discovered models tend to include mass action incidence and a seasonally varying transmission rate-a common feature of existing epidemiological models for childhood infectious diseases. We also find that the SINDy measles model is capable of out-of-sample prediction of a dynamical regime shift in measles case notification data. These results demonstrate the potential for algorithmic model discovery to enrich scientific understanding by providing a complementary approach to developing theoretical models.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".