Exploring Graph Structure in Graph Neural Networks for Epidemic Forecasting

Graph neural networks (GNNs) that incorporate cross-location signals have the ability to capture spatial patterns during infectious disease epidemics, potentially improving forecasting performance. However, these models may be susceptible to biases arising from mis-specification, particularly related to the level of connectivity within the graph (i.e., graph structure). In this paper, we investigated the impact of graph structure on GNNs for epidemic forecasting. Multiple graph structures are defined and analyzed based on several characteristics i.e., dense or sparse, geography or learned attention. We design a comprehensive ablation study and conduct experiments on real-world data. One of the major findings is that sparse graphs built using geographical information can achieve advanced performance and are more generalizable among different tasks compared with more complex attention-based adjacency matrices.