Saad Mohammad Abrar

Saad Mohammad Abrar, Naman Awasthi, Daniel Smolyak et al.

The US COVID-19 Forecast Hub, a repository of COVID-19 forecasts from over 50 independent research groups, is used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for their official COVID-19 communications. As such, the Forecast Hub is a critical centralized resource to promote transparent decision making. While the Forecast Hub has provided valuable predictions focused on accuracy, there is an opportunity to evaluate model performance across social determinants such as race and urbanization level that have been known to play a role in the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive fairness analysis of the Forecast Hub model predictions and we show statistically significant diverse predictive performance across social determinants, with minority racial and ethnic groups as well as less urbanized areas often associated with higher prediction errors. We hope this work will encourage COVID-19 modelers and the CDC to report fairness metrics together with accuracy, and to reflect on the potential harms of the models on specific social groups and contexts.

Rahul Yedida, Saad Mohammad Abrar, Cleber Melo-Filho et al.

Objective: We aim to learn potential novel cures for diseases from unstructured text sources. More specifically, we seek to extract drug-disease pairs of potential cures to diseases by a simple reasoning over the structure of spoken text. Materials and Methods: We use Google Cloud to transcribe podcast episodes of an NPR radio show. We then build a pipeline for systematically pre-processing the text to ensure quality input to the core classification model, which feeds to a series of post-processing steps for obtaining filtered results. Our classification model itself uses a language model pre-trained on PubMed text. The modular nature of our pipeline allows for ease of future developments in this area by substituting higher quality components at each stage of the pipeline. As a validation measure, we use ROBOKOP, an engine over a medical knowledge graph with only validated pathways, as a ground truth source for checking the existence of the proposed pairs. For the proposed pairs not found in ROBOKOP, we provide further verification using Chemotext. Results: We found 30.4% of our proposed pairs in the ROBOKOP database. For example, our model successfully identified that Omeprazole can help treat heartburn.We discuss the significance of this result, showing some examples of the proposed pairs. Discussion and Conclusion: The agreement of our results with the existing knowledge source indicates a step in the right direction. Given the plug-and-play nature of our framework, it is easy to add, remove, or modify parts to improve the model as necessary. We discuss the results showing some examples, and note that this is a potentially new line of research that has further scope to be explored. Although our approach was originally oriented on radio podcast transcripts, it is input-agnostic and could be applied to any source of textual data and to any problem of interest.