# Steering a Historical Disease Forecasting Model Under a Pandemic: Case of Flu and COVID-19

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11407 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11407/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [EINNs: Epidemiologically-informed Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10446/) (2022)
- [Differentiable Agent-based Epidemiology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09714/) (2022)
- [CAMul: Calibrated and Accurate Multi-view Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07438/) (2021)
- [When in Doubt: Neural Non-Parametric Uncertainty Quantification for Epidemic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03904/) (2021)
- [Data-Centric Epidemic Forecasting: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09370/) (2022)
- [Back2Future: Leveraging Backfill Dynamics for Improving Real-time Predictions in Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04420/) (2021)
- [MSGNN: Multi-scale Spatio-temporal Graph Neural Network for Epidemic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15840/) (2023)
- [Multiwave COVID-19 Prediction from Social Awareness using Web Search and Mobility Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11584/) (2021)
- [Fine-Grained Population Mobility Data-Based Community-Level COVID-19 Prediction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06257/) (2022)
- [Machine Learning for Infectious Disease Risk Prediction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03037/) (2023)
- [Transfer Learning using 66 Diseases for Disease Forecasting Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27269/) (2026)
- [Spatio-temporal stochastic graph-based learning for infectious disease forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30662/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Forecasting influenza in a timely manner aids health organizations and policymakers in adequate preparation and decision making. However, effective influenza forecasting still remains a challenge despite increasing research interest. It is even more challenging amidst the COVID pandemic, when the influenza-like illness (ILI) counts are affected by various factors such as symptomatic similarities with COVID-19 and shift in healthcare seeking patterns of the general population. Under the current pandemic, historical influenza models carry valuable expertise about the disease dynamics but face difficulties adapting. Therefore, we propose CALI-Net, a neural transfer learning architecture which allows us to 'steer' a historical disease forecasting model to new scenarios where flu and COVID co-exist. Our framework enables this adaptation by automatically learning when it should emphasize learning from COVID-related signals and when it should learn from the historical model. Thus, we exploit representations learned from historical ILI data as well as the limited COVID-related signals. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach is successful in adapting a historical forecasting model to the current pandemic. In addition, we show that success in our primary goal, adaptation, does not sacrifice overall performance as compared with state-of-the-art influenza forecasting approaches.