Graph Structure Learning from Unlabeled Data for Early Outbreak Detection

Processes such as disease propagation and information diffusion often spread over some latent network structure that must be learned from observation. Given a set of unlabeled training examples representing occurrences of an event type of interest (such as a disease outbreak), the authors aim to learn a graph structure that can be used to accurately detect future events of that type. They propose a novel framework for learning graph structure from unlabeled data by comparing the most anomalous subsets detected with and without the graph constraints. Their framework uses the mean normalized log-likelihood ratio score to measure the quality of a graph structure, and it efficiently searches for the highest-scoring graph structure. Using simulated disease outbreaks injected into real-world Emergency Department data from Allegheny County, the authors show that their method learns a structure similar to the true underlying graph, but enables faster and more accurate detection.