public health data analysts

Abstract: Compartment models of infectious diseases are often linear in coefficients that are physical parameters or products or ratios of them. We exploit this with closed-form least squares and equip the estimates with distribution-free uncertainty. Physics-informed regression (PIR) fits the parameters to finite-difference derivatives of the data; we introduce physics-informed weak regression (PIWR), which integrates the model in time instead, needs no derivatives of the data, estimates the initial state jointly and is high-order accurate. To quantify uncertainty we wrap both estimators in split conformal prediction, with a calibration population generated by the physics-based model itself, giving simultaneous intervals for all parameters with a finite-sample coverage guarantee. A residual-adaptive factor, computed without ground truth, scales the intervals to each data set (PIWR-RACC). On the eleven benchmark models of disease-informed neural networks (DINNs), PIWR or PIR-FD6 is one to four orders of magnitude more accurate than the reported DINN results wherever the sampling resolves the dynamics, in about a millisecond per fit instead of minutes to hours of training, and the 90% intervals achieve 87-92% coverage in all 88 settings. On the S3I3R model of the original PIR study, PIWR lowers the reported PIR errors by about three orders of magnitude. On real data from the 1978 boarding-school influenza outbreak, a variable-projection variant gives calibrated 95% intervals that overlap those of a Bayesian analysis. On a time-varying transmission benchmark, a B-spline expansion of beta(t) keeps PIR and PIWR linear; they are more accurate than physics-informed neural networks in three of four cases and comparable in the noisiest, with simultaneous bands for beta(t). The complete conformal calibration takes less than two minutes for every benchmark.

Abstract: Information diffusion can be controlled by restricting or removing links (edges) in online social networks, as well as in real-world networks. To identify the most influential links to remove while minimizing diffusion, previous studies have proposed upper bounds for spreading processes in SIR and SIS models, using supermodularity and weighted matrices to identify critical links in contact networks. However, in some cases, existing upper bounds are not sufficiently tight to accurately capture the effect of important edges, as in the SDIR model of [14] (Khanh-Cho-Dung, Proceedings of 40th ICOIN, 2026). We therefore propose a tighter upper bound for controlling diffusion in the SDIR model by directly analyzing the dynamics of the two state vectors D and I in a $2N$-dimensional space. This approach yields an improved spectral-radius convergence condition and outperforms the previous method. Simulations on the synthetic Erdos-Renyi network and the real-world Haslemere dataset using a Greedy edge-deletion algorithm demonstrate its effectiveness for influence minimization on social networks.