arXiv subjects

Mathilde Fekom

Publications and source records attributed to Mathilde Fekom.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Epidemic Models for COVID-19 during the First Wave from February to May 2020: a Methodological Review

We review epidemiological models for the propagation of the COVID-19 pandemic during the early months of the outbreak: from February to May 2020. The aim is to propose a methodological review that highlights the following characteristics: (i) the epidemic propagation models, (ii) the modeling of intervention strategies, (iii) the models and estimation procedures of the epidemic parameters and (iv) the characteristics of the data used. We finally selected 80 articles from open access databases based on criteria such as the theoretical background, the reproducibility, the incorporation of interventions strategies, etc. It mainly resulted to phenomenological, compartmental and individual-level models. A digital companion including an online sheet, a Kibana interface and a markdown document is proposed. Finally, this work provides an opportunity to witness how the scientific community reacted to this unique situation.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2020

Efficient stream-based Max-Min diversification with minimal failure rate

The streaming max-min diversification problem concerns the selection of a limited and diverse sample of items out of a data stream of known finite length. The objective to be maximized is the minimum distance among any pair of selected items. We consider the irrevocable-choice sampling, where decisions need to be immediate and irrevocable while processing the items of the stream, which is a setting little studied in the literature. Standard algorithmic approaches for sequential selection disregard selection failures, which is when the last items of the stream are picked by default, to prevent delivering an incomplete selection set. This defect can be catastrophic for the max-min diversification objective. The proposed Failure Rate Minimization (FRM) is a rank-based algorithm that selects a set of diverse items and, in addition, reduces significantly the probability of having failures. We demonstrate with simulations FRM's performance comparing with existing selection strategies.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2020

Dynamic Epidemic Control via Sequential Resource Allocation

In the Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) problem, an administrator has to allocate a limited amount of resources to the nodes of a network in order to reduce a diffusion process (DP) (e.g. an epidemic). In this paper we propose a multi-round dynamic control framework, which we realize through two derived models: the Restricted and the Sequential DRA (RDRA, SDRA), that allows for restricted information and access to the entire network, contrary to standard full-information and full-access DRA models. At each intervention round, the administrator has only access -- simultaneous for the former, sequential for the latter -- to a fraction of the network nodes. This sequential aspect in the decision process offers a completely new perspective to the dynamic DP control, making this work the first to cast the dynamic control problem as a series of sequential selection problems. Through in-depth SIS epidemic simulations we compare the performance of our multi-round approach with other resource allocation strategies and several sequential selection algorithms on both generated, and real-data networks. The results provide evidence about the efficiency and applicability of the proposed framework for real-life problems.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Optimal Multiple Stopping Rule for Warm-Starting Sequential Selection

In this paper we present the Warm-starting Dynamic Thresholding algorithm, developed using dynamic programming, for a variant of the standard online selection problem. The problem allows job positions to be either free or already occupied at the beginning of the process. Throughout the selection process, the decision maker interviews one after the other the new candidates and reveals a quality score for each of them. Based on that information, she can (re)assign each job at most once by taking immediate and irrevocable decisions. We relax the hard requirement of the class of dynamic programming algorithms to perfectly know the distribution from which the scores of candidates are drawn, by presenting extensions for the partial and no-information cases, in which the decision maker can learn the underlying score distribution sequentially while interviewing candidates.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

Sequential Dynamic Resource Allocation for Epidemic Control

Under the Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) model, an administrator has the mission to allocate dynamically a limited budget of resources to the nodes of a network in order to reduce a diffusion process (DP) (e.g. an epidemic). The standard DRA assumes that the administrator has constantly full information and instantaneous access to the entire network. Towards bringing such strategies closer to real-life constraints, we first present the Restricted DRA model extension where, at each intervention round, the access is restricted to only a fraction of the network nodes, called sample. Then, inspired by sequential selection problems such as the well-known Secretary Problem, we propose the Sequential DRA (SDRA) model. Our model introduces a sequential aspect in the decision process over the sample of each round, offering a completely new perspective to the dynamic DP control. Finally, we incorporate several sequential selection algorithms to SDRA control strategies and compare their performance in SIS epidemic simulations.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2018

The Warm-starting Sequential Selection Problem and its Multi-round Extension

In the Sequential Selection Problem (SSP), immediate and irrevocable decisions need to be made as candidates randomly arrive for a job interview. Standard SSP variants, such as the well-known secretary problem, begin with an empty selection set (cold-start) and perform the selection process once over a single candidate set (single-round). In this paper we address these two limitations. First, we introduce the novel Warm-starting SSP (WSSP) setting which considers at hand a reference set, a set of previously selected items of a given quality, and tries to update optimally that set by (re-)assigning each job at most once. We adopt a cutoff-based approach to optimize a rank-based objective function over the final assignment of the jobs. In our technical contribution, we provide analytical results regarding the proposed WSSP setting, we introduce the algorithm Cutoff-based Cost Minimization (CCM) (and the low failures-CCM, which is more robust to high rate of resignations) that adapts to changes in the quality of the reference set thanks to the translation method we propose. Finally, we implement and test CCM in a multi-round setting that is particularly interesting for real-world application scenarios.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2017

Exactly Solvable Random Graph Ensemble with Extensively Many Short Cycles

We introduce and analyse ensembles of 2-regular random graphs with a tuneable distribution of short cycles. The phenomenology of these graphs depends critically on the scaling of the ensembles' control parameters relative to the number of nodes. A phase diagram is presented, showing a second order phase transition from a connected to a disconnected phase. We study both the canonical formulation, where the size is large but fixed, and the grand canonical formulation, where the size is sampled from a discrete distribution, and show their equivalence in the thermodynamical limit. We also compute analytically the spectral density, which consists of a discrete set of isolated eigenvalues, representing short cycles, and a continuous part, representing cycles of diverging size.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗