Nabeel Abdur Rehman

Nabeel Abdur Rehman, Umar Saif, Rumi Chunara

The global population at risk of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and Zika is expanding. Infectious disease models commonly incorporate environmental measures like temperature and precipitation. Given increasing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery, here we consider including landscape features from satellite imagery into infectious disease prediction models. To do so, we implement a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model trained on Imagenet data and labelled landscape features in satellite data from London. We then incorporate landscape features from satellite image data from Pakistan, labelled using the CNN, in a well-known Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered epidemic model, alongside dengue case data from 2012-2016 in Pakistan. We study improvement of the prediction model for each of the individual landscape features, and assess the feasibility of using image labels from a different place. We find that incorporating satellite-derived landscape features can improve prediction of outbreaks, which is important for proactive and strategic surveillance and control programmes.

Vishwali Mhasawade, Nabeel Abdur Rehman, Rumi Chunara

Population attributes are essential in health for understanding who the data represents and precision medicine efforts. Even within disease infection labels, patients can exhibit significant variability; "fever" may mean something different when reported in a doctor's office versus from an online app, precluding directly learning across different datasets for the same prediction task. This problem falls into the domain adaptation paradigm. However, research in this area has to-date not considered who generates the data; symptoms reported by a woman versus a man, for example, could also have different implications. We propose a novel population-aware domain adaptation approach by formulating the domain adaptation task as a multi-source hierarchical Bayesian framework. The model improves prediction in the case of largely unlabelled target data by harnessing both domain and population invariant information.

Nabeel Abdur Rehman, Maxwell Matthaios Aliapoulios, Disha Umarwani et al.

Acute respiratory infections have epidemic and pandemic potential and thus are being studied worldwide, albeit in many different contexts and study formats. Predicting infection from symptom data is critical, though using symptom data from varied studies in aggregate is challenging because the data is collected in different ways. Accordingly, different symptom profiles could be more predictive in certain studies, or even symptoms of the same name could have different meanings in different contexts. We assess state-of-the-art transfer learning methods for improving prediction of infection from symptom data in multiple types of health care data ranging from clinical, to home-visit as well as crowdsourced studies. We show interesting characteristics regarding six different study types and their feature domains. Further, we demonstrate that it is possible to use data collected from one study to predict infection in another, at close to or better than using a single dataset for prediction on itself. We also investigate in which conditions specific transfer learning and domain adaptation methods may perform better on symptom data. This work has the potential for broad applicability as we show how it is possible to transfer learning from one public health study design to another, and data collected from one study may be used for prediction of labels for another, even collected through different study designs, populations and contexts.