Compositional epidemiological modeling using structured cospans

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The field of applied category theory (ACT) aims to put the compositionality inherent to scientific and engineering processes on a firm mathematical footing. In this post, we show how the mathematics of ACT can be operationalized to build complex epidemiological models in a compositional way. In the first two sections, we review the idea of structured cospans, a formalism for turning closed systems into open ones, and we illustrate its use in Catlab through the simple example of open graphs. Finally, we put this machinery to work in the setting of Petri nets and epidemiological models. We construct a portion of the COEXIST model for the COVID-19 pandemic and we simulate the resulting ODEs.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.algebraicjulia.org/post/2020/10/structured-cospans/

What’s with those dollar signs up on top? Some little bug connected to LaTeX?

Yeah, I think so; I think probably in the original post there were a bunch of latex macros between those dollar signs?