Deep learning for supervised classification of spatial epidemics

Abstract

In an emerging epidemic, public health officials must move quickly to contain the spread. Information obtained from statistical disease transmission models often informs the development of containment strategies. Inference procedures such as Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo allow researchers to estimate parameters of such models, but are computationally expensive. In this work, we explore supervised statistical and machine learning methods for fast inference via supervised classification, with a focus on deep learning. We apply our methods to simulated epidemics through two populations of swine farms in Iowa, and find that the random forest performs well on the denser population, but is outperformed by a deep learning model on the sparser population.