Spatially Directional Dual-Attention GAT for Spatial Fluoride Health Risk Modeling

Abstract

Environmental exposure to fluoride is a major public health concern, particularly in regions with naturally elevated fluoride concentrations. Accurate modeling of fluoride-related health risks, such as dental fluorosis, requires spatially aware learning frameworks capable of capturing both geographic and semantic heterogeneity. In this work, we propose Spatially Directional Dual-Attention Graph Attention Network (SDD-GAT), a novel spatial graph neural network designed for fine-grained health risk prediction. SDD-GAT introduces a dual-graph architecture that disentangles geographic proximity and attribute similarity, and incorporates a directional attention mechanism that explicitly encodes spatial orientation and distance into the message passing process. To further enhance spatial coherence, we introduce a spatial smoothness regularization term that enforces consistency in predictions across neighboring locations. We evaluate SDD-GAT on a large-scale dataset covering over 50,000 fluoride monitoring samples and fluorosis records across Guizhou Province, China. Results show that SDD-GAT significantly outperforms traditional models and state-of-the-art GNNs in both regression and classification tasks, while also exhibiting improved spatial autocorrelation as measured by Moran's I. Our framework provides a generalizable foundation for spatial health risk modeling and geospatial learning under complex environmental settings.