Surrogate Assisted Strategies (The Parameterisation of an Infectious Disease Agent-Based Model)

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive framework for calibrating infectious disease agent-based models using surrogate models, improving accuracy and efficiency in parameter estimation.

Contribution

It proposes a flexible ABMS framework that swaps parameterisation strategies and surrogate models, demonstrating improved accuracy and computational speedup in disease modeling.

Findings

Support Vector Machine surrogate with Metric Stochastic Response Surface strategy performs best.

XGBoost surrogate with DYCORS achieves highest probability of data distribution approximation.

Surrogate-assisted strategies attain comparable accuracy to baseline methods.

Abstract

Parameter calibration is a significant challenge in agent-based modelling and simulation (ABMS). An agent-based model's (ABM) complexity grows as the number of parameters required to be calibrated increases. This parameter expansion leads to the ABMS equivalent of the \say{curse of dimensionality}. In particular, infeasible computational requirements searching an infinite parameter space. We propose a more comprehensive and adaptive ABMS Framework that can effectively swap out parameterisation strategies and surrogate models to parameterise an infectious disease ABM. This framework allows us to evaluate different strategy-surrogate combinations' performance in accuracy and efficiency (speedup). We show that we achieve better than parity in accuracy across the surrogate assisted sampling strategies and the baselines. Also, we identify that the Metric Stochastic Response Surface strategy combined with the Support Vector Machine surrogate is the best overall in getting closest to the true synthetic parameters. Also, we show that DYnamic COOrdindate Search Using Response Surface Models with XGBoost as a surrogate attains in combination the highest probability of approximating a cumulative synthetic daily infection data distribution and achieves the most significant speedup with regards to our analysis. Lastly, we show in a real-world setting that DYCORS XGBoost and MSRS SVM can approximate the real world cumulative daily infection distribution with $97.12$\% and $96.75$\% similarity respectively.