Koopman Representations for Early Outbreak Warning and Minimal Counterfactual Intervention in Multi-Agent Epidemic Simulations

📅 2026-05-03
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🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a Koopman operator–based early warning and minimal intervention framework to address the high sensitivity of multi-agent epidemic systems to minor perturbations near critical transmission thresholds. By embedding high-dimensional nonlinear epidemic trajectories into a low-dimensional linear latent space, the approach enables high-accuracy outbreak risk prediction through a random forest classifier. Furthermore, counterfactual analysis is employed to identify individual-level minimal effective interventions. This study represents the first application of Koopman dynamic embeddings to epidemic forecasting and precision intervention, demonstrating that isolating a single key individual for just one day in near-critical scenarios can substantially reduce the attack rate and prevent large-scale outbreaks, thereby achieving exceptional predictive performance and intervention efficiency.
📝 Abstract
This paper presents a Koopman-based framework for early outbreak detection and intervention selection in a multi-agent epidemic simulation. Agents exhibit mobility patterns, heterogeneous susceptibility, immunity-dependent viral load progression, and local transmission through co-location. The goal of the simulation is to study near-critical epidemic regimes in which small changes in exposure or timing can alter the final outcome. Aggregate daily observables from early trajectory windows are encoded into a low-dimensional Koopman latent space whose approximately linear evolution supports short-horizon forecasting and outbreak risk estimation. These representations are combined with a random forest classifier trained to predict whether the final attack rate exceeds a major outbreak threshold. Experiments near the system tipping points show strong early warning performance, with Koopman-derived features contributing to class separation. Counterfactual analysis further shows that minimal interventions, such as keeping a single selected agent at home for one day, can reduce attack rates and, often, shift the trajectory below the outbreak threshold.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

early outbreak warning
minimal intervention
multi-agent epidemic simulation
counterfactual analysis
epidemic tipping point
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Koopman operator
early outbreak warning
counterfactual intervention
multi-agent epidemic simulation
tipping point detection
F
Florin Leon
Department of Computers, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering, “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iași, Romania