An Information-Theoretic Framework for Biosecurity under Uncertainty and Risk

Abstract: Biosecurity decisions are increasingly made in environments where signals are noisy, adversaries can adapt, and harms propagate through interdependent health, laboratory, supply-chain, and information infrastructures. This manuscript develops an information-theoretic framework for biosecurity under uncertainty and risk, treating preparedness as an evidence-governed capability to detect, interpret, and act on limited information while avoiding overconfident claims. The central argument is that biosecurity is fundamentally a problem of constrained inference: institutions must allocate attention and resources under partial observability, manage trade-offs between disclosure and protection, and design monitoring systems whose validity decays as contexts shift. Across five chapters, the book links foundations and research design to explicit uncertainty accounting; statistical modeling and causal inference to intervention evaluation; machine learning to prediction, generalization, and trustworthiness; big-data engineering to reproducible analytics and MLOps-style operations; and applied sectoral horizons to policy, industry, and governance instruments. The research outputs are practical and auditable: signal-to-decision maps, uncertainty registers, robustness and sensitivity protocols, monitoring covenants with escalation thresholds, and documentation templates that support procurement, accreditation, and cross-border coordination. Examples are globally grounded across South Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, emphasizing that defensible biosecurity requires traceable evidence, proportional controls, and revisable commitments. Keywords biosecurity, information theory, uncertainty quantification, risk governance, decision thresholds, robustness testing, sensitivity analysis, signal detection, causal inference, surveillance systems, trustworthy machine learning, distribution shift, drift monitoring, evidence traceability, reproducibility, MLOps, access control, incident response, cross-border coordination, public trust