Machine Learning Epidemic Predictions Using Agent-based Wireless Sensor Network Models
This work addresses the challenge of forecasting epidemics in resource-constrained WSNs, but it is incremental as it applies existing ML methods to a new synthetic dataset.
The study tackled the problem of predicting malware spread in wireless sensor networks by applying machine learning algorithms to synthetic epidemic data generated from an agent-based SEIRV model, achieving high R^2 values up to 1.000 on training sets and competitive results on validation sets.
The lack of epidemiological data in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a fundamental difficulty in constructing robust models to forecast and mitigate threats such as viruses and worms. Many studies have examined different epidemic models for WSNs, focusing on how malware infections spread given the network's specific properties, including energy limits and node mobility. In this study, an agent-based implementation of the susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered-vaccinated (SEIRV) mathematical model was employed for machine learning (ML) predictions. Using tools such as NetLogo's BehaviorSpace and Python, two epidemic synthetic datasets were generated and prepared for the application of several ML algorithms. Posed as a regression problem, the infected and recovered nodes were predicted, and the performance of these algorithms is compared using the error metrics of the train and test sets. The predictions performed well, with low error metrics and high R^2 values (0.997, 1.000, 0.999, 1.000), indicating an effective fit to the training set. The validation values were lower (0.992, 0.998, 0.971, and 0.999), as is typical when evaluating model performance on unseen data. Based on the recorded performances, support vector, linear, Lasso, Ridge, and ElasticNet regression were among the worst-performing algorithms, while Random Forest, XGBoost, Decision Trees, and k-nearest neighbors achieved the best results.