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

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.

37 pages, 12 figures