NeuralPALS - learning exposure functions and infection probabilities for contagion spread

Understanding how contagions spread is an important task, particularly when considering infectious diseases. An individual's likelihood of getting infected by a contagion is determined by a combination of inherent susceptibility and exposure to other individuals who may spread the disease. In a real world setting, an individual's infection status may be directly observable, but it is difficult to identify whether an individual is spreading the disease. As a result, the exact influence function by which disease is transmitted is difficult to understand as well. We present a neural network based method, NeuralPALS, to learn the spreader, exposure, and infection status of individuals in a network. Unlike previously developed methods, we do not assume an exposure function and instead devise methods to learn this function. Through experiments on synthetic data we illustrate our method's efficacy in determining both spreader and infection states. We also demonstrate NeuralPALS's ability to learn different exposure functions. In addition, we utilize a dataset of patients from a large urban hospital and demonstrate our preliminary results in determining the spread of Clostridioides difficile.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Anand, Advaith.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John Guttag.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122999

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122999