This report documents a statistical method for the "real-time" characterization of partially observed epidemics. Observations consist of daily counts of symptomatic patients, diagnosed with the disease. Characterization, in this context, refers to estimation of epidemiological parameters that can be used to provide short-term forecasts of the ongoing epidemic, as well as to provide gross information for the time-dependent infection rate. The characterization problem is formulated as a Bayesian inverse problem, and is predicated on a model for the distribution of the incubation period. The model parameters are estimated as distributions using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, thus quantifying the uncertainty in the estimates. The method is applied to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, using data at the country, provincial (e.g., states) and regional (e.g. county) levels. The epidemiological model includes a stochastic component due to uncertainties in the incubation period. This model-form uncertainty is accommodated by a pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings MCMC sampler, which produces posterior distributions that reflect this uncertainty. We approximate the discrepancy between the data and the epidemiological model using Gaussian and negative binomial error models; the latter was motivated by the over-dispersed count data. For small daily counts we find the performance of the calibrated models to be similar for the two error models. For large daily counts the negative-binomial approximation is numerically unstable unlike the Gaussian error model. Application of the model at the country level (for the United States, Germany, Italy, etc.) generally provided accurate forecasts, as the data consisted of large counts which suppressed the day-to-day variations in the observations. Further, the bulk of the data is sourced over the duration before the relaxation of the curbs on population mixing, and is not confounded by any discernible country-wide second wave of infections. At the state-level, where reporting was poor or which evinced few infections (e.g., New Mexico), the variance in the data posed some, though not insurmountable, difficulties, and forecasts were able to capture the data with large uncertainty bounds. The method was found to be sufficiently sensitive to discern the flattening of the infection and epidemic curve due to shelter-in-place orders after around 90% quantile for the incubation distribution (about 10 days for COVID-19). The proposed model was also used at a regional level to compare the forecasts for the central and north-west regions of New Mexico. Modeling the data for these regions illustrated different disease spread dynamics captured by the model. While in the central region the daily counts peaked in the late April, in the north-west region the ramp-up continued for approximately three more weeks.
The Spent Fuel and Waste Science and Technology (SFWST) Campaign of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), Office of Spent Fuel & Waste Disposition (SFWD) is conducting research and development (R&D) on geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level nuclear waste (HLW). Two high priorities for SFWST disposal R&D are design concept development and disposal system modeling (DOE 2011, Table 6). These priorities are directly addressed in the SFWST Geologic Disposal Safety Assessment (GDSA) work package, which is charged with developing a disposal system modeling and analysis capability for evaluating disposal system performance for nuclear waste in geologic media.
Two surrogate models are under development to rapidly emulate the effects of the Fuel Matrix Degradation (FMD) model in GDSA Framework. One is a polynomial regression surrogate with linear and quadratic fits, and the other is a k-Nearest Neighbors regressor (kNNr) method that operates on a lookup table. Direct coupling of the FMD model to GDSA Framework is too computationally expensive. Preliminary results indicate these surrogate models will enable GDSA Framework to rapidly simulate spent fuel dissolution for each individual breached spent fuel waste package in a probabilistic repository simulation. This capability will allow uncertainties in spent fuel dissolution to be propagated and sensitivities in FMD inputs to be quantified and ranked against other inputs.
Communication networks have evolved to a level of sophistication that requires computer models and numerical simulations to understand and predict their behavior. A network simulator is a software that enables the network designer to model several components of a computer network such as nodes, routers, switches and links and events such as data transmissions and packet errors in order to obtain device and network level metrics. Network simulations, as many other numerical approximations that model complex systems, are subject to the specification of parameters and operative conditions of the system. Very often the full characterization of the system and their input is not possible, therefore Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) strategies need to be deployed to evaluate the statistics of its response and behavior. UQ techniques, despite the advancements in the last two decades, still suffer in the presence of a large number of uncertain variables and when the regularity of the systems response cannot be guaranteed. In this context, multifidelity approaches have gained popularity in the UQ community recently due to their flexibility and robustness with respect to these challenges. The main idea behind these techniques is to extract information from a limited number of high-fidelity model realizations and complement them with a much larger number of a set of lower fidelity evaluations. The final result is an estimator with a much lower variance, i.e. a more accurate and reliable estimator can be obtained. In this contribution we investigate the possibility to deploy multifidelity UQ strategies to computer network analysis. Two numerical configurations are studied based on a simplified network with one client and one server. Preliminary results for these tests suggest that multifidelity sampling techniques might be used as effective tools for UQ tools in network applications.
