Graduating in 2020!
Tags: octograd2020, epidemic, models, datascience
Published: 2020-05-21 14:29:10

Hey everyone! This is my first dev post! I've wanted to post for a long time now, but couldn't think of a topic until now! This is a project I started building in my final year at VIT University but had to abandon in between as I received an internship offer from Stylumia Intelligence, and the work looked too cool to pass on. So, here goes.

## My Final Project
I had started looking for interesting projects to work on during my second last semester and finally came across a topic I found really interesting. Using Agent-based Modelling to predict the spread of infectious diseases. In hindsight, given the current situation, this seems like the best project I could have invested my time into. But back in December 2019, Covid-19 wasn't as big as a phenomenon as it is now, and epidemiology wasn't a topic cool kids picked. 

![CNN Image when China confirmed that the coronavirus could spread through humans](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200120211505-05-coronavirus-2020-exlarge-169.jpg)

So the initial idea was to build a platform where researchers could use disease heuristics to understand how a disease spreads. But soon I realized that one platform couldn't meet the needs of the very wide range of diseases, infections that were possible. 

My project guide also recommended that I shouldn't try to boil the ocean, and focus on the low hanging fruit first. So, I decided that I would pick two different diseases, which had very different characteristics, and try to model them. I come from India, and the obvious choices were Malaria, Dengue, HIV, etc.  
![Different Modelling Approaches](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323944952/figure/fig1/AS:616357649453064@1523962523736/Conceptual-frameworks-of-different-epidemic-models-The-colors-represent-epidemiological.png)
But as I was about to finalize on one of these, an online clickbait site told me that a new virus in China had killed 6 people, and over 300 people had been infected. What could be a better use-case than to model a disease that was spreading by the second? 

That was the moment I decided that the novel coronavirus would be the object of my modeling. 

Here's a fun quote by Kathleen Carley, Director of CMU’s Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems, on why we need to build better simulations of disease spread to model biowarfare.

_“You don’t want to run an actual attack on a city, of course. That would be unethical.”​_

I used this quote in my initial presentation to my guide. She didn't laugh.

I'll continue how I progressed in a series of posts. Meanwhile, here are a few resources that I came across when there were less spam and clickbait regarding epidemic modeling. I hope you find this interesting.

* https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-46599-4_13
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/epidemic-model
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1755436514000334
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1755436514000553
* http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~regina/research/notes123.pdf
* https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-46599-4_13