Yuan Luo

Yikuan Li, Chengsheng Mao, Kaixuan Huang et al.

Scarcity of health care resources could result in the unavoidable consequence of rationing. For example, ventilators are often limited in supply, especially during public health emergencies or in resource-constrained health care settings, such as amid the pandemic of COVID-19. Currently, there is no universally accepted standard for health care resource allocation protocols, resulting in different governments prioritizing patients based on various criteria and heuristic-based protocols. In this study, we investigate the use of reinforcement learning for critical care resource allocation policy optimization to fairly and effectively ration resources. We propose a transformer-based deep Q-network to integrate the disease progression of individual patients and the interaction effects among patients during the critical care resource allocation. We aim to improve both fairness of allocation and overall patient outcomes. Our experiments demonstrate that our method significantly reduces excess deaths and achieves a more equitable distribution under different levels of ventilator shortage, when compared to existing severity-based and comorbidity-based methods in use by different governments. Our source code is included in the supplement and will be released on Github upon publication.

Hanyin Wang, Meghan R. Hutch, Yikuan Li et al.

Over 12 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered at the time of writing. However, public perceptions of vaccines have been complex. We analyzed COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets to understand the evolving perceptions of COVID-19 vaccines. We finetuned a deep learning classifier using a state-of-the-art model, XLNet, to detect each tweet's sentiment automatically. We employed validated methods to extract the users' race or ethnicity, gender, age, and geographical locations from user profiles. Incorporating multiple data sources, we assessed the sentiment patterns among subpopulations and juxtaposed them against vaccine uptake data to unravel their interactive patterns. 11,211,672 COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets corresponding to 2,203,681 users over two years were analyzed. The finetuned model for sentiment classification yielded an accuracy of 0.92 on testing set. Users from various demographic groups demonstrated distinct patterns in sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccines. User sentiments became more positive over time, upon which we observed subsequent upswing in the population-level vaccine uptake. Surrounding dates where positive sentiments crest, we detected encouraging news or events regarding vaccine development and distribution. Positive sentiments in pregnancy-related tweets demonstrated a delayed pattern compared with trends in general population, with postponed vaccine uptake trends. Distinctive patterns across subpopulations suggest the need of tailored strategies. Global news and events profoundly involved in shaping users' thoughts on social media. Populations with additional concerns, such as pregnancy, demonstrated more substantial hesitancy since lack of timely recommendations. Feature analysis revealed hesitancies of various subpopulations stemmed from clinical trial logics, risks and complications, and urgency of scientific evidence.

Chongyang Wan, Shunbo Lei, Yuan Luo

The increasing severity of climate change necessitates an urgent transition to renewable energy sources, making the large-scale adoption of wind energy crucial for mitigating environmental impact. However, the inherent uncertainty of wind power poses challenges for grid stability, underscoring the need for accurate wind energy prediction models to enable effective power system planning and operation. While many existing studies on wind power prediction focus on short-term forecasting, they often overlook the importance of long-term predictions. Long-term wind power forecasting is essential for effective power grid dispatch and market transactions, as it requires careful consideration of weather features such as wind speed and direction, which directly influence power output. Consequently, methods designed for short-term predictions may lead to inaccurate results and high computational costs in long-term settings. To adress these limitations, we propose a novel approach called Hybrid Frequency Feature Enhancement Inverted Transformer (Hiformer). Hiformer introduces a unique structure that integrates signal decomposition technology with weather feature extraction technique to enhance the modeling of correlations between meteorological conditions and wind power generation. Additionally, Hiformer employs an encoder-only architecture, which reduces the computational complexity associated with long-term wind power forecasting. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, Hiformer: (i) can improve the prediction accuracy by up to 52.5\%; and (ii) can reduce computational time by up to 68.5\%.