Discrete Interventions in Hawkes Processes with Applications in Invasive Species Management

Discrete Interventions in Hawkes Processes with Applications in Invasive Species Management

Amrita Gupta, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Bistra Dilkina, Hongyuan Zha

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3385-3392. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/470

The spread of invasive species to new areas threatens the stability of ecosystems and causes major economic losses. We propose a novel approach to minimize the spread of an invasive species given a limited intervention budget. We first model invasive species spread using Hawkes processes, and then derive closed-form expressions for characterizing the effect of an intervention action on the invasion process. We use this to obtain an optimal intervention plan based on an integer programming formulation, and compare the optimal plan against several ecologically-motivated heuristic strategies used in practice. We present an empirical study of two variants of the invasive control problem: minimizing the final rate of invasions, and minimizing the number of invasions at the end of a given time horizon. The optimized intervention achieves nearly the same level of control that would be attained by completely eradicating the species, but at only 60-80\% of the cost.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Time-series;Data Streams
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Computational Sustainability
Machine Learning Applications: Networks