Proceedings of the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference M. Rabe, A. A. Juan, N. Mustafee, A. Skoogh, S. Jain, and B. Johansson, eds. PARAMETERIZATION AND CALIBRATION OF MICRO-SIMULATION MODEL FOR CERVICAL CANCER AND HIV IN ZAMBIA Kasey Jones Joey Morris Georgiy Bobashev Center for Data Science RTI International 3040 E Cornwallis Rd Durham, NC 27709, USA Sujha Subramanian Public Health Research Division RTI International 307 Waverley Oaks Road Waltham, MA 02452, USA ABSTRACT Zambia has one of the highest rates of cervical cancer in the world. To help policy makers make future intervention decisions regarding cervical cancer, we created a micro-simulation model to simulate cervical cancer and HIV in Zambia. Model calibration faced two major challenges: (1) Much of the available input data was on women in the United States, which do not allow calibration to align to the age-specific targets from Zambia; (2) Significant computational resources were not always available. We addressed issue one by creating age-specific calibration parameters to help better match specific targets. Issue two was addressed by using predictive models before conducting calibration simulations to discard parameter sets that are likely to produce poor results. This paper will demonstrate these two modeling strategies and show the dramatic effect they had on our ability to accurately calibrate to model targets. 1 INTRODUCTION Cervical cancer lead to almost 266,000 deaths in 2012 (Subramanian et al. 2008). This is particular a problem in countries where resources and screening programs are scarce. Among women in Sub-Saharan Africa, cervical cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related deaths (GLOBOCAN 2014). A high- prevalence of HIV, mixed with the fact that women who have HIV are six times more likely to get cervical cancer, make this region prone to higher cervical cancer rates (Martel et al. 2012). There are low-cost strategies available to prevent cervical cancer. Testing the impact of these strategies is expensive and in countries with already limited resources may not be possible. Micro-simulations can model the progress of human papillomavirus (HPV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Zambia and can access the impact and cost of intervention strategies. For the result of these tests to be trusted, the micro-simulation needs to calibrate well to known rates of cervical cancer, HPV, and HIV in Zambia. Our goal is develop a micro-simulaiton that will allow researches to assess the cost-effectiveness of interventions for fighting cervical cancer in Zambia and build a bases for conducting similar research in other countries. 1.1 Micro-Simulation Basics On top of modeling HPV and HIV, our micro-simulation models cancer detection, cancer progression, and current life status. Each component is made up of states. For example, if a woman is alive, her life state is alive. The current state for a woman is advanced through monthly time-steps from age nine until death or age 100. Transitions among the five states (HIV, HPV, cancer detection, cancer progression, and life) are generated using probabilities that account for the woman’s other states and current age. 1013 978-1-5386-6572-5/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE