An Adaptive Treatment Strategy for the Management of White-Nose Syndrome

• Activity Number: 268
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Nick Meyer*+ and Eric B. Laber and Krishna Pacifici and Brian Reich and John Drake
• Companies: North Carolina State University and North Carolina State University and North Carolina State University and North Carolina State University and University of Georgia
• Keywords: adaptive treatment strategies ; White-Nose syndrome ; invasive species

Abstract

Bats are a primary consumer of agricultural pests and insect vectors of human disease. Consequently, the emergence of White-Nose Syndrome, a rapidly spreading and fatal fungus afflicting bats, poses a serious threat to U.S. agriculture, ecosystem diversity, and human health. We construct a data-driven adaptive sequential treatment strategy for the management of White-Nose Syndrome which combines systems dynamics models and online updating algorithms. The proposed method uses historical data and ecological theory to estimate a systems dynamics model which is used to derive an initial treatment strategy. The initial treatment strategy is then updated as data accumulates over time using a stochastic approximation algorithm. We show the proposed method is consistent under regularity conditions and derive a null distribution for parameters indexing the estimated optimal treatment strategy. The method is illustrated using simulated experiments.