The third COVID-19 Engineering Lecture Series “Predicting COVID-19 Case Numbers from Government Policy Responses: A Machine Learning Approach” was conducted on April 28, 2021 by Dr Hao Luo of Department of Computer Science and Department of Social Work and Social Administration. The talk was facilitated by Professor S.C. Wong Associate Dean (Development and External Relations).
The rapid spread of COVID-19 infection has prompted a wide range of responses from governments, with the intention to either suppress or mitigate the transmission by using non-pharmaceutical interventions. To forecast the impact of different interventions on the COVID-19 epidemic, conventional micro-simulation models, which rely heavily on parametric methods with pre-determined predictors, have been adopted. However, applying this kind of modelling strategy is challenging because: 1) governments exhibited substantial variations in their adopted measures and these measures have been constantly adjusted as the situation has evolved; 2) people may respond to government policies differently due to their cultural and religious background, expectations and norms, and the influence of both traditional news media and social media; and 3) detailed data on population density and travel patterns may be inaccurate or unavailable. To account for complicated interactions of government responses and the pre-existing policy environment, the team explored the usage of state-of-the-art machine learning models in predicting COVID-19 case numbers using standardised policy indicators from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT). During the talk, Dr Luo has reported the recent findings in the performance of several machine learning models, including XGBoost, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU). She also discussed the opportunities and challenges of using machine learning in epidemiology and health outcomes research.
The next COVID-19 Engineering Lecture Series “Behaviour Analysis of MTR passengers during COVID-19: A Data Driven Approach” will be conducted on June 28, 2021.
Please stay tuned for further detail at: https://engg.hku.hk/COVID-19-Engineering-Lecture-Series