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Record W4416205280 · doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2025.112290

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

2025· article· en· W4416205280 on OpenAlex
Adam Howes, Alex Stringer, Seth Flaxman, Jeffrey W. Eaton

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Theoretical Biology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMathematics
TopicStatistical Methods and Bayesian Inference
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersMedical Research CouncilNational Institutes of HealthForeign, Commonwealth and Development OfficeEngineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilUniversity of WaterlooJoint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDSNational Institute of Allergy and Infectious DiseasesNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaEuropean CommissionBill and Melinda Gates Foundation
KeywordsInferenceBayes' theoremBayesian inferenceGaussian processHuman immunodeficiency virus (HIV)Bayesian probabilityMonte Carlo methodMarkov chain Monte Carlo

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 TMBR 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 TMBC++ 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)0.005
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.586
Threshold uncertainty score0.596

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
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 head0.029
GPT teacher head0.374
Teacher spread0.345 · 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