# Single Model for Influenza Forecasting of Multiple Countries by Multi-task Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.01760 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01760/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [DeepAR: Probabilistic Forecasting with Autoregressive Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04110/) (2017)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Time Series Forecasting With Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13408/) (2020)
- [Learning Word Vectors for 157 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06893/) (2018)
- [Conditional Time Series Forecasting with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04691/) (2017)
- [Accurate estimation of influenza epidemics using Google search data via ARGO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00864/) (2015)
- [Density Matching for Bilingual Word Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02343/) (2019)
- [Towards the Use of Neural Networks for Influenza Prediction at Multiple Spatial Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02673/) (2019)
- [Seasonal Web Search Query Selection for Influenza-Like Illness (ILI) Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06833/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The accurate forecasting of infectious epidemic diseases such as influenza is a crucial task undertaken by medical institutions. Although numerous flu forecasting methods and models based mainly on historical flu activity data and online user-generated contents have been proposed in previous studies, no flu forecasting model targeting multiple countries using two types of data exists at present. Our paper leverages multi-task learning to tackle the challenge of building one flu forecasting model targeting multiple countries; each country as each task. Also, to develop the flu prediction model with higher performance, we solved two issues; finding suitable search queries, which are part of the user-generated contents, and how to leverage search queries efficiently in the model creation. For the first issue, we propose the transfer approaches from English to other languages. For the second issue, we propose a novel flu forecasting model that takes advantage of search queries using an attention mechanism and extend the model to a multi-task model for multiple countries' flu forecasts. Experiments on forecasting flu epidemics in five countries demonstrate that our model significantly improved the performance by leveraging the search queries and multi-task learning compared to the baselines.