Epidemic Forecasting Framework Combining Agent-Based Models and Smart Beam Particle Filtering

Abstract

Over the past decades, numerous techniques have been developed to forecast the temporal evolution of epidemic outbreaks. This paper proposes an approach that combines high resolution agent-based models using realistic social contact networks for simulating epidemic evolution with a particle filter based method for assimilation based forecasting. Agent-based modeling using realistic social contact networks provides two key advantages: (i) they capture the causal processes underlying the epidemic and hence are useful to understand the role of interventions on the course of the epidemics – typically time series models cannot capture this and as a result often do not perform well in such situations; (ii) they provide detailed forecast information – this allows us to produce forecast at high levels of temporal, spatial and social granularity. We also propose a new variation of particle filter technique called beam search particle filtering. The modification allows us to more efficiently search the parameter space which is necessitated by the fact that agent-based techniques are computationally expensive. We illustrate our methodology on the synthetic dataset of Ebola provided as a part of the NSF/NIH Ebola forecasting challenge. Our results show the efficacy of the proposed approach and suggest that agent-based causal models can be combined with filtering techniques to yield a new class of assimilation models for infectious disease forecasting.