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arXiv · 2602.22270

Prior Knowledge-enhanced Spatio-temporal Epidemic Forecasting

Sijie Ruan·Jinyu Li·Jia Wei·Zenghao Xu·Jie Bao·Junshi Xu·Junyang Qiu·Shuliang Wang·Xiaoxiao Wang·Hanning Yuan
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Abstract

Spatio-temporal epidemic forecasting is critical for public health management, yet existing methods often struggle with insensitivity to weak epidemic signals, over-simplified spatial relations, and unstable parameter estimation. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatio-Temporal priOr-aware Epidemic Predictor (STOEP), a novel hybrid framework that integrates implicit spatio-temporal priors and explicit expert priors. STOEP consists of three key components: (1) Case-aware Adjacency Learning (CAL), which dynamically adjusts mobility-based regional dependencies using historical infection patterns; (2) Space-informed Parameter Estimating (SPE), which employs learnable spatial priors to amplify weak epidemic signals; and (3) Filter-based Mechanistic Forecasting (FMF), which uses an expert-guided adaptive thresholding strategy to regularize epidemic parameters. Extensive experiments on real-world COVID-19 and influenza datasets demonstrate that STOEP outperforms the best baseline by 11.1% in RMSE. The system has been deployed at a provincial CDC in China to facilitate downstream applications.

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Sijie Ruan, Jinyu Li, Jia Wei, Zenghao Xu, Jie Bao, Junshi Xu, Junyang Qiu, Shuliang Wang, Xiaoxiao Wang, Hanning Yuan. 2026-02-25. Prior Knowledge-enhanced Spatio-temporal Epidemic Forecasting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22270

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