Cooperating Graph Neural Networks with Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vaccine Prioritization
This work addresses vaccine allocation challenges for public health authorities in areas with limited resources, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods by integrating detailed behavioral dynamics.
The study tackled the problem of micro-level vaccine prioritization under limited supply by incorporating mobility heterogeneity and using a novel deep reinforcement learning approach with graph neural networks, resulting in a 7-10% reduction in infections and deaths compared to baseline strategies.
This study explores the vaccine prioritization strategy to reduce the overall burden of the pandemic when the supply is limited. Existing methods conduct macro-level or simplified micro-level vaccine distribution by assuming the homogeneous behavior within subgroup populations and lacking mobility dynamics integration. Directly applying these models for micro-level vaccine allocation leads to sub-optimal solutions due to the lack of behavioral-related details. To address the issue, we first incorporate the mobility heterogeneity in disease dynamics modeling and mimic the disease evolution process using a Trans-vaccine-SEIR model. Then we develop a novel deep reinforcement learning to seek the optimal vaccine allocation strategy for the high-degree spatial-temporal disease evolution system. The graph neural network is used to effectively capture the structural properties of the mobility contact network and extract the dynamic disease features. In our evaluation, the proposed framework reduces 7% - 10% of infections and deaths than the baseline strategies. Extensive evaluation shows that the proposed framework is robust to seek the optimal vaccine allocation with diverse mobility patterns in the micro-level disease evolution system. In particular, we find the optimal vaccine allocation strategy in the transit usage restriction scenario is significantly more effective than restricting cross-zone mobility for the top 10% age-based and income-based zones. These results provide valuable insights for areas with limited vaccines and low logistic efficacy.