Title
Finding Spatial Clusters Susceptible to Epidemic Outbreaks due to Undervaccination
Abstract
Geographical clusters of undervaccinated populations have emerged in various parts of the United States in recent years. Public health response involves surveillance and field work, which is very resource intensive. Given that public health resources are often limited, identifying and rank-ordering critical clusters can help prioritize and allocate scarce resources for surveillance and quick intervention. We quantify the criticality of a cluster as the additional number of infections caused if the cluster is underimmunized. We focus on finding clusters that maximize this measure and develop efficient approximation algorithms for finding critical clusters by exploiting structural properties of the problem. Our methods involve solving a more general problem of maximizing a submodular function on a graph with connectivity constraints. We apply our methods to the state of Minnesota, where we find clusters with significantly higher criticality than those obtained by heuristics used in public health.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.5555/3398761.3398982
AAMAS '19: International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Auckland New Zealand May, 2020
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
2020
1558-2914
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-7518-4
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jose Cadena1987.53
Achla Marathe220323.77
Anil Kumar S. Vullikanti3113598.30