A unified framework of epidemic spreading prediction by empirical mode decomposition based ensemble learning techniques

In this paper, a unified susceptible-exposed-infected-susceptible-aware (SEIS-A) framework is proposed to combine epidemic spreading with individuals' on-line self-consultation behaviors. An epidemic spreading prediction model is established based on the SEIS-A framework. The prediction process contains two phases. In phase I, the time series data of disease density are decomposed through the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method to obtain the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). In phase II, the ensemble learning techniques which use the on-line query data as an additional input are applied to these IMFs. Finally, experiments for prediction of weekly consultation rates of Hand-foot-and-mouth disease (HFMD) in Hong Kong are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The main advantage of this method is that it outperforms other methods on fluctuating complex data.

A Constrained Cooperative Coevolution Strategy for Weights Adaptation Optimization of Heterogeneous Epidemic Spreading Networks

In this paper, the dynamic constrained optimization problem of weights adaptation for heterogeneous epidemic spreading networks is investigated. Due to the powerful ability of searching global optimum, evolutionary algorithms are employed as the optimizers. One major difficulty following is that the dimension of the weights adaptation optimization problem is increasing exponentially with the network size and most existing evolutionary algorithms cannot achieve satisfied performance on large-scale optimization problems. To address this issue, a novel constrained cooperative coevolution ($C^3$) strategy which can separate the original large-scale problem into different subcomponents is tailored for this problem. Meanwhile, the $\epsilon$ constraint-handling technique is employed to achieve the tradeoff between constraint and objective function. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, some numerical simulations are conducted on a B\' arabasi-Albert network.