耦合人群移动的COVID-19传染病模型研究进展

构建传染病模型可为疫情防控与公共卫生研究提供至关重要的规划与解析工具。由于宿主行为是传染病传播动态的决定性因素之一,有效耦合人群时空行为对以人为宿主的传染病建模具有重要意义。得益于人群移动大数据研究与应用的快速发展,新型冠状病毒肺炎（COVID-19）的疫情建模研究中呈现出了耦合人群移动建模的显著特征。为系统深入理解该项传染病模型研究中的重要进展,本文对相关文献进行分析与总结。首先,本文分析了COVID-19疫情与人群移动的交互影响,说明了耦合人群移动构建COVID-19模型的必要性。然后,根据建模的目的和原理,从疫情短期预测与过程模拟2个角度,对耦合人群移动的COVID-19传染病模型进行分类梳理。其中,根据耦合人群移动的方式,本文将面向疫情短期预测的模型分为人群移动一阶量与人群移动二阶量的耦合模型,将基于过程模拟的模型分为群体级别和个体级别的耦合模型。最后,本文评述了耦合人群移动的传染病模型研究进展和未来发展方向,认为该领域研究亟需更加深入建模与疾病传播相关的复杂人群时空行为、提升模型的空间解析能力、突破精细化时空传播模拟的计算瓶颈、拓展与前沿人工智能方法的融合,并构建普适而开放的建模数据与工具以促进应用发展。

Integrating Human Mobility into the Epidemiological Models of COVID-19:Progress and Challenges

The spread of infectious diseases is usually a highly nonlinear space-time diffusion process. Epidemiological models can not only be used to predict the epidemic trend, but also be used to systematically and scientifically study the transmission mechanism of the complex processes under different hypothetical intervention scenarios, which provide crucial analytical and planning tools for public health studies and policy-making. Since host behavior is one of the critical driven factors for the dynamics of infectious diseases, it is important to effectively integrate human spatiotemporal behavior into the epidemiological models for human-hosted infectious diseases. Due to the rapid development of human mobility research and applications aided by big trajectory data, many of the epidemiological models for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) have already coupled human mobility. By incorporating real trajectory data such as mobile phone location data at an individual or aggregated level, researchers are working towards the direction of accurately depicting the real world, so as to improve the effectiveness of the model in guiding actual epidemic prevention and control. The epidemic trend prediction, Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) evaluation, vaccination strategy design, and transmission driven factors have been studied by the epidemiological models coupled with human mobility, which provides scientific decision-making aid for controlling epidemic in different countries and regions. In order to systematically understand this important progress of epidemiological models, this study collected and summarized relevant literatures. First, the interactions between the COVID-19 epidemic and human mobility were analyzed, which demonstrated the necessity of integrating the complex spatiotemporal behavior, such as population-based or individual-based mobility, activity, and contact interaction, into the epidemiological models. Then, according to the modeling purpose and mechanism, the models integrated with human mobility were discussed by two types: short-term epidemic prediction models and process simulation models. Among them, based on the coupling methods of human mobility, short-term epidemic prediction models can further be divided into models coupled with first-order and second-order human mobility, while process simulation models can be divided into models coupled with population-based mobility and individual-based mobility. Finally, we concluded that epidemiological models integrating human mobility should be developed towards more complex human spatiotemporal behaviors with a fine spatial granularity. Besides, it is in urgent need to improve the model capability to better understand the disease spread processes over space and time, break through the bottleneck of the huge computational cost of fine-grained models, cooperate cutting-edge artificial intelligence approaches, and develop more universal and accessible modeling data sets and tools for general users.