Mina Petrić

Branislava Lalic, Dinh Viet Cuong, Mina Petric et al.

Vector-borne diseases continue to pose a significant health threat globally with more than 3 billion people at risk each year. Despite some limitations, mechanistic dynamic models are a popular approach to representing biological processes using ordinary differential equations where the parameters describe the different development and survival rates. Recent advances in population modelling have seen the combination of these mechanistic models with machine learning. One approach is physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) whereby the machine learning framework embeds physical, biological, or chemical laws into neural networks trained on observed or measured data. This enables forward simulations, predicting system behaviour from given parameters and inputs, and inverse modelling, improving parameterisation of existing parameters and estimating unknown or latent variables. In this paper, we focus on improving the parameterisation of biological processes in mechanistic models using PINNs to determine inverse parameters. In comparing mechanistic and PINN models, our experiments offer important insights into the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches but demonstrated that the PINN approach generally outperforms the dynamic model. For a deeper understanding of the performance of PINN models, a final validation was used to investigate how modifications to PINN architectures affect the performance of the framework. By varying only a single component at a time and keeping all other factors constant, we are able to observe the effect of each change.

Dinh Viet Cuong, Branislava Lalić, Mina Petrić et al.

Physics informed neural networks have been gaining popularity due to their unique ability to incorporate physics laws into data-driven models, ensuring that the predictions are not only consistent with empirical data but also align with domain-specific knowledge in the form of physics equations. The integration of physics principles enables the method to require less data while maintaining the robustness of deep learning in modelling complex dynamical systems. However, current PINN frameworks are not sufficiently mature for real-world ODE systems, especially those with extreme multi-scale behavior such as mosquito population dynamical modelling. In this research, we propose a PINN framework with several improvements for forward and inverse problems for ODE systems with a case study application in modelling the dynamics of mosquito populations. The framework tackles the gradient imbalance and stiff problems posed by mosquito ordinary differential equations. The method offers a simple but effective way to resolve the time causality issue in PINNs by gradually expanding the training time domain until it covers entire domain of interest. As part of a robust evaluation, we conduct experiments using simulated data to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach. Preliminary results indicate that physics-informed machine learning holds significant potential for advancing the study of ecological systems.