دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی شبکه های بیزی فضا زمانی برای پیشگیری از مالاریا - الزویر 2018

abstract

Targeted intervention and resource allocation are essential for effective malaria control, particularly in remote areas, with predictive models providing important information for decision making. While a diversity of modeling technique have been used to create predictive models of malaria, no work has made use of Bayesian networks. Bayes nets are attractive due to their ability to represent uncertainty, model time lagged and nonlinear relations, and provide explanations. This paper explores the use of Bayesian networks to model malaria, demonstrating the approach by creating village level models with weekly temporal resolution for Tha Song Yang district in northern Thailand. The networks are learned using data on cases and environmental covariates. Three types of networks are explored: networks for numeric prediction, networks for outbreak prediction, and networks that incorporate spatial autocorrelation. Evaluation of the numeric prediction network shows that the Bayes net has prediction accuracy in terms of mean absolute error of about 1.4 cases for 1 week prediction and 1.7 cases for 6 week prediction. The network for outbreak prediction has an ROC AUC above 0.9 for all prediction horizons. Comparison of prediction accuracy of both Bayes nets against several traditional modeling approaches shows the Bayes nets to outperform the other models for longer time horizon prediction of high incidence transmission. To model spread of malaria over space, we elaborate the models with links between the village networks. This results in some very large models which would be far too laborious to build by hand. So we represent the models as collections of probability logic rules and automatically generate the networks. Evaluation of the models shows that the autocorrelation links significantly improve prediction accuracy for some villages in regions of high incidence. We conclude that spatiotemporal Bayesian networks are a highly promising modeling alternative for prediction of malaria and other vector-borne diseases.

7. Conclusions & future research

We have shown how Bayesian networks may be used for accurate malaria prediction. Our networks are able to integrate environmental and case information and make use of temporal and non-temporal covariates. Evaluation on test data shows that the Bayes net has prediction accuracy in terms of mean absolute error of about 1.4 cases for 1 week prediction and 1.7 cases for 6 week prediction. Accuracy of predicting outbreaks for high incidence villages ranges from 0.566 to 0.67 PR AUC against a random baseline accuracy of 0.082. Comparison of the Bayes net prediction accuracy with severaltraditional modeling approaches shows the Bayes net to outperform the other models on the most important cases: longer time horizon prediction of high incidence transmission. This is the case for numeric case prediction as well as binary outbreak prediction. This seems due to the superior ability of the Bayes net to incorporate the effect of environmental covariates, which have increasing importance with longer prediction horizons.