# Leveraging Wastewater Monitoring for COVID-19 Forecasting in the US: a Deep Learning study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08798 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08798/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [A Comparative Study on Transformer vs RNN in Speech Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06317/) (2019)
- [Deep Transformer Models for Time Series Forecasting: The Influenza Prevalence Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08317/) (2020)
- [Darts: User-Friendly Modern Machine Learning for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03224/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic Forecasting with Temporal Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04397/) (2019)
- [Automated Detection and Forecasting of COVID-19 using Deep Learning Techniques: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10785/) (2020)
- [Inter-Series Attention Model for COVID-19 Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13006/) (2020)
- [COUnty aggRegation mixup AuGmEntation (COURAGE) COVID-19 Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00620/) (2021)
- [Deep Transformer Model with Pre-Layer Normalization for COVID-19 Growth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06356/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The outburst of COVID-19 in late 2019 was the start of a health crisis that shook the world and took millions of lives in the ensuing years. Many governments and health officials failed to arrest the rapid circulation of infection in their communities. The long incubation period and the large proportion of asymptomatic cases made COVID-19 particularly elusive to track. However, wastewater monitoring soon became a promising data source in addition to conventional indicators such as confirmed daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Despite the consensus on the effectiveness of wastewater viral load data, there is a lack of methodological approaches that leverage viral load to improve COVID-19 forecasting. This paper proposes using deep learning to automatically discover the relationship between daily confirmed cases and viral load data. We trained one Deep Temporal Convolutional Networks (DeepTCN) and one Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) model to build a global forecasting model. We supplement the daily confirmed cases with viral loads and other socio-economic factors as covariates to the models. Our results suggest that TFT outperforms DeepTCN and learns a better association between viral load and daily cases. We demonstrated that equipping the models with the viral load improves their forecasting performance significantly. Moreover, viral load is shown to be the second most predictive input, following the containment and health index. Our results reveal the feasibility of training a location-agnostic deep-learning model to capture the dynamics of infection diffusion when wastewater viral load data is provided.