SOS-EW: System for Overdose Spike Early Warning Using Drug Mover’s Distance-Based Hawkes Processes

Abstract

Opioid addictions and overdoses have increased across the U.S. and internationally over the past decade. In urban environments, overdoses cluster in space and time, with 50% of overdoses occurring in less than 5% of the city and dozens of calls for emergency medical services being made within a 48-hour period. In this work, we introduce a system for early detection of opioid overdose clusters based upon the toxicology report of an initial event. We first use drug SMILES, one hot encoded molecular substructures, to generate a bag of drug vectors corresponding to each overdose (overdoses are often characterized by multiple drugs taken at the same time). We then use spectral clustering to generate overdose categories and estimate multivariate Hawkes processes for the space-time intensity of overdoses following an initial event. As the productivity parameter of the process depends on the overdose category, this allows us to estimate the magnitude of an overdose spike based on the substances present (e.g. fentanyl leads to more subsequent overdoses compared to Oxycontin). We validate the model using opioid overdose deaths in Indianapolis and show that the model outperforms several recently introduced Hawkes-Topic models based on Dirichlet processes. Our system could be used in combination with drug test strips to alert drug using populations of risky batches on the market or to more efficiently allocate naloxone to users and health/social workers.