title: Towards a multi-level game model for influenza epidemics.
abstract: Although game theory has been first invented to reason with economic scenarios with rational agents, it has since been extended into many other fields including biological and medical sciences. In this paper we propose to model the interactions between virus and human in an influenza epidemic in a two player, adversarial game scenario with multiple levels of abstraction. As conventional game representations are inadequate in this complex problem domain, we propose Object Oriented Multi-Agent Influence Diagrams (OO-MAID), a novel graphical representation for multi-level games, which takes advantage of both organizational information and probabilistic independence in the problem domain. The OO-MAID representation can be readily applied in similar medical independent characteristics. We demonstrate the feasibility of this novel approach with sample models in the domain.
authors.affiliation: Medical Computing Laboratory, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore. chenqy@comp.nus.edu.sg
authors.forename: Qiongyu
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Tze-Yun
authors.initials: TY
authors.lastname: Leong
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D058872:Epidemics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D007251:Influenza, Human / Q000517:prevention & control*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D016016:Proportional Hazards Models; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods; D012307:Risk Factors; D018571:Sentinel Surveillance