Predictive Situation Awareness for Ebola Virus Disease using a Collective Intelligence Multi-Model Integration Platform: Bayes Cloud
This work addresses the problem of improving epidemic prediction and decision-making for public health officials, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing causal modeling approaches.
The paper tackles the challenge of predicting infectious disease epidemics by developing a collective intelligence multi-model integration platform called Bayes Cloud, which integrates causal models from multiple experts to provide predictive situation awareness, demonstrated in a use case for Ebola virus disease.
The humanity has been facing a plethora of challenges associated with infectious diseases, which kill more than 6 million people a year. Although continuous efforts have been applied to relieve the potential damages from such misfortunate events, it is unquestionable that there are many persisting challenges yet to overcome. One related issue we particularly address here is the assessment and prediction of such epidemics. In this field of study, traditional and ad-hoc models frequently fail to provide proper predictive situation awareness (PSAW), characterized by understanding the current situations and predicting the future situations. Comprehensive PSAW for infectious disease can support decision making and help to hinder disease spread. In this paper, we develop a computing system platform focusing on collective intelligence causal modeling, in order to support PSAW in the domain of infectious disease. Analyses of global epidemics require integration of multiple different data and models, which can be originated from multiple independent researchers. These models should be integrated to accurately assess and predict the infectious disease in terms of holistic view. The system shall provide three main functions: (1) collaborative causal modeling, (2) causal model integration, and (3) causal model reasoning. These functions are supported by subject-matter expert and artificial intelligence (AI), with uncertainty treatment. Subject-matter experts, as collective intelligence, develop causal models and integrate them as one joint causal model. The integrated causal model shall be used to reason about: (1) the past, regarding how the causal factors have occurred; (2) the present, regarding how the spread is going now; and (3) the future, regarding how it will proceed. Finally, we introduce one use case of predictive situation awareness for the Ebola virus disease.