State-space modelling for infectious disease surveillance data: Stochastic simulation techniques and structural change detection
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present an exploration of advanced stochastic simulation techniques for state-space models, with a specific focus on their applications in infectious disease modelling. Utilizing COVID-19 surveillance data from the province of Ontario, Canada, we employ Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods to detect structural changes and pre-dict future trends in case counts. Our approach begins with the application of a Kalman smoothing technique, integrated with MCMC for state sampling within local level and seasonal models, alongside Bayesian inference for non-linear dynamic regression models. We then assess the effectiveness of various priors, including normal, Student's t, Laplace, and horseshoe distributions, in capturing abrupt changes within the data using a Rao-Blackwellized par-ticle filter. Our findings highlight the superior performance of the horseshoe prior in identifying change points and adapting to complex data structures, offering valuable insights for real-time monitoring and forecasting in public health. This study emphasizes the efficacy of state-space models, particu-larly when enhanced with sophisticated prior distributions, in providing a nuanced understanding of infectious disease transmission.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it