Large-Scale Exact Epidemiological Modelling with Multi-Dimensional Constrained Optimization Approaches.

Abstract

Multi-dimensional prediction models of the pandemic diseases should be constructed in a way to reflect their peculiar epidemiological characters. In this paper, a graph theory-based constrained multi-dimensional (CM) mathematical and meta-heuristic algorithms (MA) are formed to learn the unknown parameters of a large-scale epidemiological model. The specified parameter signs and the coupling parameters of the sub-models constitute the constraints of the optimization problem. In addition, magnitude constraints on the unknown parameters are imposed to proportionally weight the input-output data importance. To learn these parameters, a gradient-based CM recursive least square (CM-RLS) algorithm, and three search-based MAs; namely, the CM particle swarm optimization (CM-PSO), the CM success history-based adaptive differential evolution (CM-SHADE), and the CM-SHADEWO enriched with the whale optimization (WO) algorithms are constructed. The traditional SHADE algorithm was the winner of the 2018 IEEE congress on evolutionary computation (CEC) and its versions in this paper are modified to create more certain parameter search spaces. The results obtained under the equal conditions show that the mathematical optimization algorithm CM-RLS outperforms the MA algorithms, which is expected since it uses the available gradient information. However, the search-based CM-SHADEWO algorithm is able to capture the dominant character of the CM optimization solution and produce satisfactory estimates in the presence of the hard constraints, uncertainties and lack of gradient information.