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SUMMARY:Generating Medium-Term Projections of Covid-19 for Wales. - Daniel
  Archambault (Newcastle University) &amp\; Alma Rahat (Swansea University)
DTSTART:20240207T140000Z
DTEND:20240207T150000Z
UID:TALK212017@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Ciara Dangerfield
DESCRIPTION: One of the key tools used by the Welsh Government during its 
 devolved pandemic decision-making was a stochastic\, age-structured\, loca
 l authority level\, epidemiological model\, designed to capture the key dy
 namics\, and project the potential future spread and hospital impact under
  a range of formal assumptions. Some of these models are complex and often
  take several seconds or minutes to generate a single simulation on severa
 l indicators of interest\, e.g. prevalence\, deaths\, hospital admissions\
 , and intensive care burden. The typical approach to fitting the models to
  observed data consists of optimising model parameters to fit a weighted s
 um of the mean squared errors (MSE) between the model output and multiple 
 time series data. In this work\, we combined MSE and maximum absolute dist
 ance between projections and data using augmented Tchebyshev scalarisation
  as a measure of the error. Furthermore\, to combat the computational expe
 nse of optimising up to 50 parameters of the model\, we used a multi-objec
 tive Bayesian optimisation approach to simultaneously minimise the errors 
 between six time-series projections and data. This approach yielded a good
  approximation of the sets of parameters that generated (near-)optimal tra
 de-off fits between different targets\, and was easily generalisable in po
 st-processing if different weights were required for each data stream. The
  resultant trade-off front allowed us to interactively generate appropriat
 e visual aids\, and\, most importantly\, "Medium-Term Projections" (MTPs) 
 for Wales\, deemed plausible by experts. Our generated MTPs have been prep
 ared in collaboration with the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Mode
 lling (SPI-M) and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA)\, and included in 
 their weekly published reports. They were updated weekly\, and delivered t
 o stakeholders in Welsh Government\, Public Health Wales\, the NHS Wales H
 ospital Trusts\, the Ambulance Trust\, and directly impacted planning\, as
 sessment and decision-making.
LOCATION:Zoom
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