Inferring global-scale temporal latent topics from news reports to predict public health interventions for COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of non-pharmacological interventions (NPI) for controlling epidemics of emerging infectious diseases. Despite their importance, NPI have been monitored mainly through the manual efforts of volunteers. This approach hinders measurement of the NPI effectiveness and development of evidence to guide their use to control the global pandemic. We present EpiTopics, a machine learning approach to support automation of the NPI prediction and monitoring at both the document-level and country-level by mining the vast amount of unlabelled news reports on COVID-19. EpiTopics uses a 3-stage, transfer-learning algorithm to classify documents according to NPI categories, relying on topic modelling to support result interpretation. We identified 25 interpretable topics under 4 distinct and coherent COVID-related themes. Importantly, the use of these topics resulted in significant improvements over alternative automated methods in predicting the NPIs in labelled documents and in predicting country-level NPIs for 42 countries.