Computationally Efficient Estimation of Localized Treatment Effects for Multi-Level, Multi-Component Interventions to Address the Opioid Crisis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a bi-level metamodel framework with a two-stage sequential design to efficiently estimate localized treatment effects of interventions on opioid overdose mortality, reducing computational costs significantly.

Contribution

It develops a novel bi-level metamodel with sequential sampling to efficiently estimate localized treatment effects in complex epidemic models.

Findings

Achieves approximately 5% average relative error with only 10% of the full simulation runs.

Effectively captures spatial and socio-economic variations in treatment effects.

Reduces computational burden for policymakers evaluating intervention strategies.

Abstract

The opioid epidemic remains a major public health challenge in the United States, requiring a multi-pronged intervention approach to mitigate harms to communities. Given the heterogeneity of the epidemic across the country, it is crucial for policymakers to understand localized treatment effects of different intervention components and utilize limited resources efficiently. While locally calibrated simulation models offer a useful computational tool to project the epidemic outcomes for any given intervention policy, collecting simulation results for all intervention combinations to estimate localized treatment effects for each community is impractical because the number of possible intervention combinations grows exponentially with the number of interventions and levels at which they are applied. To tackle this, we develop a bi-level metamodel framework with a two-stage sequential design for efficient sampling. The metamodel consists of a response function linking health outcomes to each intervention component's treatment effect, and a Gaussian process regression to learn spatial and socio-economic structures of the treatment effects based on locally-contextualized covariates. With two-stage sequential sampling, we leverage spatial correlations and posterior uncertainty to sequentially sample the most informative counties and treatment conditions. We apply this framework to estimate treatment effects of buprenorphine dispensing and naloxone distribution on overdose mortality rates using a calibrated agent-based opioid epidemic model in PA counties. Our approach achieves approximately 5% average relative error using one-tenth the number of runs required for an exhaustive simulation. Our bi-level framework provides a computationally efficient approach to support policymakers, in evaluating resource-allocation strategies to mitigate the opioid epidemic in local communities.