The wisdom of a crowd of near-best fits

Drug-resistant tuberculosis in the United States

Authors

  • Ellie Mainou Department of Biology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Author
  • Gwen Spencer Convoy, Inc., Seattle, WA Author
  • Dylan Shepardson Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA Author
  • Robert Dorit Department of Biological Sciences, 5 College Biomathematics Program, Smith College, Northampton, MA Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30707/LiB7.1.1647875325.991654

Keywords:

Model fitting, Tuberculosis, Disease dynamics, Compartmental models, Genetic algorithm

Abstract

Antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis (TB) strains pose a major challenge to TB eradication. Existing US epidemiological models have not fully incorporated the impact of antibiotic-resistance. To develop a more realistic model of US TB dynamics, we formulated a compartmental model integrating single- and multi-drug resistance. We fit twenty-seven parameters to twenty-two years of historical data using a genetic algorithm to minimize a non-differentiable error function. Since counts for several compartments are not available, many parameter combinations achieve very low error. We demonstrate that a crowd of near-best fits can provide compelling new evidence about the ranges of key parameters. While available data is sparse and insufficient to produce point estimates, our crowd of near-best fits computes remarkably consistent predictions about TB prevalence. We believe that our crowd-based approach is applicable to a common problem in mathematical biological research, namely situations where data are sparse and reliable point estimates cannot be directly obtained.

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Published

2020-03-03

Issue

Section

Research

How to Cite

The wisdom of a crowd of near-best fits: Drug-resistant tuberculosis in the United States. (2020). Letters in Biomathematics, 7(1), 15-35. https://doi.org/10.30707/LiB7.1.1647875325.991654

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