Backbone-based Dynamic Graph Spatio-Temporal Network for Epidemic Forecasting

Accurate epidemic forecasting is a critical task in controlling disease transmission. Many deep learning-based models focus only on static or dynamic graphs when constructing spatial information, ignoring their relationship. Additionally, these models often rely on recurrent structures, which can lead to error accumulation and computational time consumption. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a novel model called Backbone-based Dynamic Graph Spatio-Temporal Network (BDGSTN). Intuitively, the continuous and smooth changes in graph structure, make adjacent graph structures share a basic pattern. To capture this property, we use adaptive methods to generate static backbone graphs containing the primary information and temporal models to generate dynamic temporal graphs of epidemic data, fusing them to generate a backbone-based dynamic graph. To overcome potential limitations associated with recurrent structures, we introduce a linear model DLinear to handle temporal dependencies and combine it with dynamic graph convolution for epidemic forecasting. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that BDGSTN outperforms baseline models and ablation comparison further verifies the effectiveness of model components. Furthermore, we analyze and measure the significance of backbone and temporal graphs by using information metrics from different aspects. Finally, we compare model parameter volume and training time to confirm the superior complexity and efficiency of BDGSTN.