2022/12/05 by Danfeng Guo, Guo, Danfeng, Zijie Huang +9
Mathematics · Medicine · Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #Data-Driven Disease Surveillance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.02575
openalex publication_date 2022/12/05 · openalex created_date 2022/12/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Pandemic(epidemic) modeling, aiming at disease spreading analysis, has always been a popular research topic especially following the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2019. Some representative models including SIR-based deep learning prediction models have shown satisfactory performance. However, one major drawback for them is that they fall short in their long-term predictive ability. Although graph convolutional networks (GCN) also perform well, their edge representations do not contain complete information and it can lead to biases. Another drawback is that they usually use input features which they are unable to predict. Hence, those models are unable to predict further future. We propose a model that can propagate predictions further into the future and it has better edge representations. In particular, we model the pandemic as a spatial-temporal graph whose edges represent the transition of infections and are learned by our model. We use a two-stream framework that contains GCN and recursive structures (GRU) with an attention mechanism. Our model enables mobility analysis that provides an effective toolbox for public health researchers and policy makers to predict how different lock-down strategies that actively control mobility can influence the spread of pandemics. Experiments show that our model outperforms others in its long-term predictive power. Moreover, we simulate the effects of certain policies and predict their impacts on infection control.