Predictive performance of multi-model ensemble forecasts of COVID-19 across European nations. - In: eLife, ISSN 2050-084X, Bd. 12 (2023), e81916, S. 1-23
Background: Short-term forecasts of infectious disease contribute to situational awareness and capacity planning. Based on best practice in other fields and recent insights in infectious disease epidemiology, one can maximise forecasts’ predictive performance by combining independent models into an ensemble. Here we report the performance of ensemble predictions of COVID-19 cases and deaths across Europe from March 2021 to March 2022. Methods: We created the European COVID-19 Forecast Hub, an online open-access platform where modellers upload weekly forecasts for 32 countries with results publicly visualised and evaluated. We created a weekly ensemble forecast from the equally-weighted average across individual models' predictive quantiles. We measured forecast accuracy using a baseline and relative Weighted Interval Score (rWIS). We retrospectively explored ensemble methods, including weighting by past performance. Results: We collected weekly forecasts from 48 models, of which we evaluated 29 models alongside the ensemble model. The ensemble had a consistently strong performance across countries over time, performing better on rWIS than 91% of forecasts for deaths (N=763 predictions from 20 models), and 83% forecasts for cases (N=886 predictions from 23 models). Performance remained stable over a 4-week horizon for death forecasts but declined with longer horizons for cases. Among ensemble methods, the most influential choice came from using a median average instead of the mean, regardless of weighting component models. Conclusions: Our results support combining independent models into an ensemble forecast to improve epidemiological predictions, and suggest that median averages yield better performance than methods based on means. We highlight that forecast consumers should place more weight on incident death forecasts than case forecasts at horizons greater than two weeks. Funding: European Commission, Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, FEDER; Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries de Catalunya; Netzwerk Universitätsmedizin; Health Protection Research Unit; Wellcome Trust; European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control; Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland; Federal Ministry of Education and Research; Los Alamos National Laboratory; German Free State of Saxony; NCBiR; FISR 2020 Covid-19 I Fase; Spanish Ministry of Health / REACT-UE (FEDER); National Institutes of General Medical Sciences; Ministerio de Sanidad/ISCIII; PERISCOPE European H2020; PERISCOPE European H2021; InPresa; National Institutes of Health, NSF, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Google, University of Virginia, Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81916
Generalized modeling of photoluminescence transients. - In: Physica status solidi, ISSN 1521-3951, Bd. 260 (2023), 1, 2200339, S. 1-12
Time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) measurements and the extraction of meaningful parameters involve four key ingredients: a suitable sample such as a semiconductor double heterostructure, a state-of-the-art measurement setup, a kinetic model appropriate for the description of the sample behavior, and a general analysis method to extract the model parameters of interest from the measured TRPL transients. Until now, the last ingredient is limited to single curve fits, which are mostly based on simple models and least-squares fits. These are often insufficient for the parameter extraction in real-world applications. The goal of this article is to give the community a universal method for the analysis of TRPL measurements, which accounts for the Poisson distribution of photon counting events. The method can be used to fit multiple TRPL transients simultaneously using general kinematic models, but should also be used for single transient fits. To demonstrate this approach, multiple TRPL transients of a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure are fitted simultaneously using coupled rate equations. It is shown that the simultaneous fits of several TRPL traces supplemented by systematic error estimations allow for a more meaningful and more robust parameter determination. The statistical methods also quantify the quality of the description by the underlying physical model.
https://doi.org/10.1002/pssb.202200339
Microfluidically-assisted isolation and characterization of Achromobacter spanius from soils for microbial degradation of synthetic polymers and organic solvents. - In: Environments, ISSN 2076-3298, Bd. 9 (2022), 12, 147, S. 1-17
A micro segmented-flow approach was utilized for the isolation soil bacteria that can degrade synthetic polymers as polyethylene glycols (PEG) and polyacrylamide (PAM). We had been able to obtain many strains; among them, five Achromobacter spanius strains from soil samples of specific sampling sites that were connected with ancient human impacts. In addition to the characterization of community responses and isolating single strains, this microfluidic approach allowed for investigation of the susceptibility of Achromobacter spanius strains against three synthetic polymers, including PEG, PAM, and Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and two organic solvents known as 1,4-dioxane and diglyme. The small stepwise variation of effector concentrations in 500 nL droplets provides a detailed reflection of the concentration-dependent response of bacterial growth and endogenous autofluorescence activity. As a result, all five strains can use PEG600 as carbon source. Furthermore, all strains showed similar dose-response characteristics in 1,4-dioxane and diglyme. However, significantly different PAM- and PVP-tolerances were found for these strains. Samples from the surface soil of prehistorical rampart areas supplied a strain capable of degradation of PEG, PVP, and PAM. This study demonstrates on the one hand, the potential of microsegment flow for miniaturized dose-response screening studies and its ability to detect novel strains, and on the other hand, two of five isolated Achromobacter spanius strains may be useful in providing optimal growth conditions in bioremediation and biodegradation processes.
https://doi.org/10.3390/environments9120147
National and subnational short-term forecasting of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland during early 2021. - In: Communications medicine, ISSN 2730-664X, Bd. 2 (2022), 136, S. 1-17
During the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a strong interest in forecasts of the short-term development of epidemiological indicators to inform decision makers. In this study we evaluate probabilistic real-time predictions of confirmed cases and deaths from COVID-19 in Germany and Poland for the period from January through April 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s43856-022-00191-8
Analysis of safety-critical cloud architectures with multi-trajectory simulation. - In: 2022 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS), (2022), insges. 7 S.
Dynamic safety-critical systems require model-based techniques and tools for their systems design. The paper presents a stochastic Petri net model of an industrial safetycritical cloud server architecture for train control. Its reliability has to be evaluated to assess tradeoffs in architecture and level of fault tolerance. Simulation methods are too slow for such rare-event problems, while numerical analysis techniques suffer from the state-space explosion problem. The paper extends a recently developed multi-trajectory simulation algorithm combining elements of simulation and numerical analysis such that it increases the accuracy of rare-event simulations within a given computation time budget. Simulation experiments have been carried out with a prototype tool.
https://doi.org/10.1109/RAMS51457.2022.9893923
How much testing and social distancing is required to control COVID-19? : some insight based on an age-differentiated compartmental model. - In: SIAM journal on control and optimization, ISSN 1095-7138, Bd. 60 (2022), 2, S. S145-S169
In this paper, we provide insights on how much testing and social distancing is required to control COVID-19. To this end, we develop a compartmental model that accounts for key aspects of the disease: incubation time, age-dependent symptom severity, and testing and hospitalization delays; the model's parameters are chosen based on medical evidence, and, for concreteness, adapted to the German situation. Then, optimal mass-testing and age-dependent social distancing policies are determined by solving optimal control problems both in open loop and within a model predictive control framework. We aim to minimize testing and/or social distancing until herd immunity sets in under a constraint on the number of available intensive care units. We find that an early and short lockdown is inevitable but can be slowly relaxed over the following months.
https://doi.org/10.1137/20M1377783
A pre-registered short-term forecasting study of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland during the second wave. - In: Nature Communications, ISSN 2041-1723, Bd. 12 (2021), 5173, S. 1-16
Disease modelling has had considerable policy impact during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and it is increasingly acknowledged that combining multiple models can improve the reliability of outputs. Here we report insights from ten weeks of collaborative short-term forecasting of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland (12 October-19 December 2020). The study period covers the onset of the second wave in both countries, with tightening non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and subsequently a decay (Poland) or plateau and renewed increase (Germany) in reported cases. Thirteen independent teams provided probabilistic real-time forecasts of COVID-19 cases and deaths. These were reported for lead times of one to four weeks, with evaluation focused on one- and two-week horizons, which are less affected by changing NPIs. Heterogeneity between forecasts was considerable both in terms of point predictions and forecast spread. Ensemble forecasts showed good relative performance, in particular in terms of coverage, but did not clearly dominate single-model predictions. The study was preregistered and will be followed up in future phases of the pandemic.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25207-0
How to coordinate vaccination and social distancing to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks. - In: SIAM journal on applied dynamical systems, ISSN 1536-0040, Bd. 20 (2021), 2, S. 1135-1157
Most countries have started vaccinating people against COVID-19. However, due to limited production capacities and logistical challenges it will take months/years until herd immunity is achieved. Therefore, vaccination and social distancing have to be coordinated. In this paper, we provide some insight on this topic using optimization-based control on an age-differentiated compartmental model. For real-life decision-making, we investigate the impact of the planning horizon on the optimal vaccination/social distancing strategy. We find that in order to reduce social distancing in the long run, without overburdening the health care system, it is essential to vaccinate the people with the highest contact rates first. That is also the case if the objective is to minimize fatalities provided that the social distancing measures are sufficiently strict. However, for short-term planning it is optimal to focus on the high-risk group.
https://doi.org/10.1137/20M1387687
Admissible kernels for RKHS embedding of probability distributions. - In: Statistical papers, ISSN 1613-9798, Bd. 62 (2021), 3, S. 1499-1518
Similarity measurement of two probability distributions is important in many applications of statistics. Embedding such distributions into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) has many favorable properties. The choice of the reproducing kernel is crucial in the approach. We study this question by considering the similarity of two distributions of the same class. In particular, we investigate when the RKHS embedding is "admissible" in the sense that the distance between the embeddings should become smaller when the expectations are getting closer or when the variance is increasing to infinity. We give conditions on the widely-used translation-invariant reproducing kernels to be admissible. We also extend the study to multivariate non-symmetric Gaussian distributions.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00362-019-01144-5
Integrating simulation and numerical analysis in the evaluation of generalized stochastic Petri nets. - In: ACM transactions on modeling and computer simulation, ISSN 1558-1195, Bd. 29 (2019), 4, S. 24:1-24:25
https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3321518