Back

ViralSim - A Novel Method for Simulating Pandemics with Geographical Data

Cai, B. D.

2025-07-08 epidemiology
10.1101/2025.07.07.25330516 medRxiv
Show abstract

Accurately simulating viral evolution is critical for evaluating analytical tools, forecasting outbreaks, and improving our understanding of pathogen dynamics. ViralSim introduces a geographically structured agent-based model that emphasizes spatial transmission across clustered populations. Unlike prior approaches that primarily focus on genetic, purely statistical, or temporal parameters, ViralSim incorporates location-driven spread and explicit trait evolution. More over, the produced phylogeny enables the calculation and fine-tuning of diverse fitness metrics directly from ViralSim. These fitness measures provide insight into lineage success, and with enough development, offer a new way to analyze phylogenies. By combining spatial transmission, trait development, and fitness evaluation, ViralSim enables controlled benchmarking of phylogenetic and epidemiological analyses.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.