ADVISER: AI-Driven Vaccination Intervention Optimiser for Increasing Vaccine Uptake in Nigeria

TL;DR

This paper introduces ADVISER, an AI-driven framework using heuristic optimization to improve vaccination rates in Nigeria, demonstrating superior results over baseline methods and paving the way for data-driven health interventions.

Contribution

We develop a novel heuristic optimization framework, ADVISER, for allocating health interventions to maximize vaccination uptake in Nigeria, including theoretical bounds and real-world experimental validation.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods in increasing vaccination rates

Provides theoretical bounds for the heuristic approach

Enables deployment of AI-driven vaccination programs in Nigeria

Abstract

More than 5 million children under five years die from largely preventable or treatable medical conditions every year, with an overwhelmingly large proportion of deaths occurring in under-developed countries with low vaccination uptake. One of the United Nations' sustainable development goals (SDG 3) aims to end preventable deaths of newborns and children under five years of age. We focus on Nigeria, where the rate of infant mortality is appalling. We collaborate with HelpMum, a large non-profit organization in Nigeria to design and optimize the allocation of heterogeneous health interventions under uncertainty to increase vaccination uptake, the first such collaboration in Nigeria. Our framework, ADVISER: AI-Driven Vaccination Intervention Optimiser, is based on an integer linear program that seeks to maximize the cumulative probability of successful vaccination. Our optimization formulation is intractable in practice. We present a heuristic approach that enables us to solve the problem for real-world use-cases. We also present theoretical bounds for the heuristic method. Finally, we show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline methods in terms of vaccination uptake through experimental evaluation. HelpMum is currently planning a pilot program based on our approach to be deployed in the largest city of Nigeria, which would be the first deployment of an AI-driven vaccination uptake program in the country and hopefully, pave the way for other data-driven programs to improve health outcomes in Nigeria.