Data-Driven Immunization

Abstract

Given a contact network and coarse-grained diagnostic information like electronic Healthcare Reimbursement Claims (eHRC) data, can we develop efficient intervention policies to control an epidemic? Immunization is an important problem in multiple areas especially epidemiology and public health. However, most existing studies focus on developing pre-emptive strategies assuming prior epidemiological models. In practice, disease spread is usually complicated, hence assuming an underlying model may deviate from true spreading patterns, leading to possibly inaccurate interventions. Additionally, the abundance of health care surveillance data (like eHRC) makes it possible to study data-driven strategies without too many restrictive assumptions. Hence, such an approach can help public-health experts take more practical decisions. In this paper, we take into account propagation log and contact networks for controlling propagation. We formulate the novel and challenging Data-Driven Immunization problem without assuming classical epidemiological models. To solve it, we first propose an efficient sampling approach to align surveillance data with contact networks, then develop an efficient algorithm with the provably approximate guarantee for immunization. Finally, we show the effectiveness and scalability of our methods via extensive experiments on multiple datasets, and conduct case studies on nation-wide real medical surveillance data.