Accurate epidemiological models require parameter estimates that account for mobility patterns and social network structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of probabilistic programming for parameter inference in these models. We consider an agent-based simulation that represents mobility networks as degree-corrected stochastic block models, whose parameters we estimate from cell phone co-location data. We then use probabilistic program inference methods to approximate the distribution over disease transmission parameters conditioned on reported cases and deaths. Our experiments demonstrate that the resulting models improve the quality of fit in multiple geographies relative to baselines that do not model network topology.
Copyright: © 2022 Smedemark-Margulies et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.