Project Details
The U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences
The Army possesses vast amounts of administrative data on Soldiers’ aptitude tests, demographics, family composition, training, fitness, promotions, and deployment history. We are embracing new ways to repurpose these existing Army data to measure the social characteristics of individual Soldiers and units. Through modern data science techniques, we are uncovering the social characteristics of individual and unit performance that drives Soldiers to successfully meet the challenges of rapid technological change they may need to address in future wars. We are recategorizing these data in a social context to capture Army values and Warrior Ethos, such as courage, honor, loyalty, and empathy. Additional data, such as that available from U.S. federal statistical agencies are used to understand the influences of the economy and world conflict on predictors and outcomes of performance. Taken together, these repurposed data are integrated into statistical models to describe Soldier and unit performance.
For the continued support of Scenario Modeling Hub, we plan to leverage and extend both our existing modeling frameworks being used for COVID-19 policy support. UVA-EpiHiper is an agent-based model that leverages a detailed digital twin representation of the United States, along with individual-level age-stratified representation of disease states and transitions. Non-pharmaceutical interventions are implemented as individual activity modifications, infectivity/susceptibility changes, and location closures. UVA-adaptive is a discrete-time compartmental model at the county/state level, which incorporates effective vaccinations, time-varying case ascertainment, and variant dynamics to calibrate to observed case rates and project forward under different conditions. It is built upon an open-source metapopulation framework, PatchSim, used in the past for modeling seasonal influenza and Ebola. For the most recent (Omicron) rounds, the SEIR dynamics have been significantly expanded to accommodate the multiple tiers of immunity due to vaccination and infections due to different variants.
- Collaborative ensembles are more robust for policymaking during times of pandemic uncertainty.
- Model diversity in terms of spatiotemporal trajectories across different epochs requires more careful analyses.