arXiv subjects

Jair Certorio

Publications and source records attributed to Jair Certorio.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Epidemic Population Games And Perturbed Best Response Dynamics

This paper proposes an approach to mitigate epidemic spread in a population of strategic agents by encouraging safer behaviors through carefully designed rewards. These rewards, which adapt to the evolving state of the epidemic, are ascribed by a dynamic payoff mechanism we seek to design. We use a modified SIRS model to track how the epidemic progresses in response to the agents' strategic choices. By employing perturbed best response evolutionary dynamics to model the population's strategic behavior, we extend previous related work so as to allow for noise in the agents' perceptions of the rewards and intrinsic costs of the available strategies. Central to our approach is the use of system-theoretic methods and passivity concepts to obtain a Lyapunov function, ensuring the global asymptotic stability of an endemic equilibrium with minimized infection prevalence under budget constraints. We leverage the Lyapunov function to analyze how the epidemic's spread rate is influenced by the time scale of the payoff mechanism's dynamics. Additionally, we derive anytime upper bounds on both the infectious fraction of the population and the instantaneous cost a social planner must incur to control the spread, allowing us to quantify the trade-off between peak infection prevalence and the corresponding cost. For a class of one-parameter perturbed best response models, we propose a method to learn the model's parameter from data.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2024

Passivity Tools for Hybrid Learning Rules in Large Populations

Recent work has pioneered the use of system-theoretic passivity to study equilibrium stability for the dynamics of noncooperative strategic interactions in large populations of learning agents. In this and related works, the stability analysis leverages knowledge that certain ``canonical'' classes of learning rules used to model the agents' strategic behaviors satisfy a passivity condition known as $δ$-passivity. In this paper, we consider that agents exhibit learning behaviors that do not align with a canonical class. Specifically, we focus on characterizing $δ$-passivity for hybrid learning rules that combine elements from canonical classes. Our analysis also introduces and uses a more general version of $δ$-passivity, which, for the first time, can handle discontinuous learning rules, including those showing best-response behaviors. We state and prove theorems establishing $δ$-passivity for two broad convex cones of hybrid learning rules. These cones can merge into a larger one preserving $δ$-passivity in scenarios limited to two strategies. In our proofs, we establish intermediate facts that are significant on their own and could potentially be used to further generalize our work. We illustrate the applicability of our results through numerical examples.

math.DS↗

arXiv2022

Epidemic Population Games With Nonnegligible Disease Death Rate

A recent article that combines normalized epidemic compartmental models and population games put forth a system theoretic approach to capture the coupling between a population's strategic behavior and the course of an epidemic. It introduced a payoff mechanism that governs the population's strategic choices via incentives, leading to the lowest endemic proportion of infectious individuals subject to cost constraints. Under the assumption that the disease death rate is approximately zero, it uses a Lyapunov function to prove convergence and formulate a quasi-convex program to compute an upper bound for the peak size of the population's infectious fraction. In this article, we generalize these results to the case in which the disease death rate is nonnegligible. This generalization brings on additional coupling terms in the normalized compartmental model, leading to a more intricate Lyapunov function and payoff mechanism. Moreover, the associated upper bound can no longer be determined exactly, but it can be computed with arbitrary accuracy by solving a set of convex programs.

math.DS↗

arXiv2022

Epidemic Population Games And Evolutionary Dynamics

We propose a system theoretic approach to select and stabilize the endemic equilibrium of an SIRS epidemic model in which the decisions of a population of strategically interacting agents determine the transmission rate. Specifically, the population's agents recurrently revise their choices out of a set of strategies that impact to varying levels the transmission rate. A payoff vector quantifying the incentives provided by a planner for each strategy, after deducting the strategies' intrinsic costs, influences the revision process. An evolutionary dynamics model captures the population's preferences in the revision process by specifying as a function of the payoff vector the rates at which the agents' choices flow toward strategies with higher payoffs. Our main result is a dynamic payoff mechanism that is guaranteed to steer the epidemic variables (via incentives to the population) to the endemic equilibrium with the smallest infectious fraction, subject to cost constraints. We use a Lyapunov function not only to establish convergence but also to obtain an (anytime) upper bound for the peak size of the population's infectious portion.

math.DS↗