Utilizing Socio-Economic Indicators and Artificial Neural Networks to Predict COVID-19 Spread in Canadian Health Regions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores how well Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) can predict the spread of COVID-19 across Canadian health regions, focusing on the impact of socio-economic factors. By examining a wide range of demographic, economic, and social indicators, we identify which factors play the biggest role in accurately forecasting the pandemic’s spread. The trained ANN model underscores the critical role of urbanization, population density, and social behaviors in densely populated regions, such as Toronto and Montreal, where transmission rates were higher. Conversely, remote regions like the Keewatin Yatthé and Labrador-Grenfell Health Authorities saw lower transmission due to geographic isolation and community-based controls. Additionally, the study highlights disparities in healthcare infrastructure, especially in ICU bed availability, which were more pronounced in urban areas. Vaccination rates were also identified as key in controlling the spread, with proactive public health efforts leading to higher rates in regions like the Northwest Territories. Our findings show that these socio-economic factors vary in importance from one region to another, offering valuable insights for public health planning. These findings provide practical advice for improving how resources are allocated and how public health strategies are developed, emphasizing the need to consider socio-economic differences in pandemic forecasting. This approach aims to help policymakers and health officials respond more effectively to current and future public health challenges.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.008 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".