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Record W4416051414 · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.15665

Fast approximate Bayesian inference of HIV indicators using PCA adaptive Gauss-Hermite quadrature

2025· preprint· en· W4416051414 on OpenAlex

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.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueArXiv.org · 2025
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldMathematics
TopicStatistical Methods and Bayesian Inference
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersEuropean and Developing Countries Clinical Trials PartnershipMedical Research CouncilNational Institutes of HealthForeign, Commonwealth and Development OfficeEngineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilUniversity of WaterlooNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaEuropean CommissionBill and Melinda Gates Foundation
KeywordsInferenceBayes' theoremBayesian inferenceBayesian probabilityHuman immunodeficiency virus (HIV)Gaussian processMarkov chain Monte CarloMonte Carlo method

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Naomi is a spatial evidence synthesis model used to produce district-level HIV epidemic indicators in sub-Saharan Africa. Multiple outcomes of policy interest, including HIV prevalence, HIV incidence, and antiretroviral therapy treatment coverage are jointly modelled using both household survey data and routinely reported health system data. The model is provided as a tool for countries to input their data to and generate estimates with during a yearly process supported by UNAIDS. Previously, inference has been conducted using empirical Bayes and a Gaussian approximation, implemented via the TMB R package. We propose a new inference method based on an extension of adaptive Gauss-Hermite quadrature to deal with more than 20 hyperparameters. Using data from Malawi, our method improves the accuracy of inferences for model parameters, while being substantially faster to run than Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with the No-U-Turn sampler. Our implementation leverages the existing TMB C++ template for the model's log-posterior, and is compatible with any model with such a template.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.385
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.098
GPT teacher head0.380
Teacher spread0.282 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it