THEME
STATUS: ACTIVE
UPDATED: 2026.05
USDA_ARS_Research_Assistant
Viral_Disease_Forecasting
Miss_State_Vet_&_Biomed_Science
RESEARCH SYSTEM

Forecasting
for Disease
Biosurveillance.

My research focuses on county-level machine learning systems for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), with an emphasis on forward-looking forecasting, leakage-safe evaluation, and interpretable risk outputs.

DOMAIN: H5N1 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza
SCALE: county-month forecasting
HORIZON: One-month-ahead outbreak risk
OUTPUT: Interactive county-level risk maps

Forecasting Framework

COUNTY_MONTH_MODELING

Modeling HPAI outbreak risk across the conterminous United States using environmental, agricultural, climatological, and geospatial data streams.

LEAKAGE_SAFE_PIPELINES

Building forward-only forecasting infrastructure with time-gated feature construction, persisted artifacts, and monthly backtesting.

SPATIOTEMPORAL_LEARNING

Evaluating graph-based and spatiotemporal ML model architectures over county adjacency networks, capturing regional disease dynamics.

RARE_EVENT_EVALUATION

Designing evaluation workflows for highly imbalanced data (~1% positives), prioritizing balanced accuracy and recall.

DECISION_SUPPORT_OUTPUTS

Translating model outputs into interpretable county-level risk maps, diagnostics, and interactive web-based tools for disease biosurveillance.