# Forecasting West Nile virus with deep graph encoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22657 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22657/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Visualizing the Loss Landscape of Neural Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09913/) (2017)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [A Tutorial on Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02811/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Scaling is Predictable, Empirically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00409/) (2017)
- [Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14486/) (2022)
- [DeepGCNs: Can GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03751/) (2019)
- [Evaluation: from precision, recall and F-measure to ROC, informedness, markedness and correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16061/) (2020)
- [High-Performance Large-Scale Image Recognition Without Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06171/) (2021)
- [Why gradient clipping accelerates training: A theoretical justification for adaptivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11881/) (2019)
- [The Shattered Gradients Problem: If resnets are the answer, then what is the question?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08591/) (2017)
- [Recent Advances in Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03301/) (2022)
- [Densely Connected Graph Convolutional Networks for Graph-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05957/) (2019)
- [Semi-supervised User Geolocation via Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08049/) (2018)
- [Classifier Calibration with ROC-Regularized Isotonic Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12436/) (2023)
- [Column Networks for Collective Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04508/) (2016)
- [Forecasting West Nile Virus with Graph Neural Networks: Harnessing Spatial Dependence in Irregularly Sampled Geospatial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11367/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

West Nile virus is a significant, and growing, public health issue in the United States. With no human vaccine, mosquito control programs rely on accurate forecasting to determine when and where WNV will emerge. Recently, spatial Graph neural networks (GNNs) were shown to be a powerful tool for WNV forecasting, significantly improving over traditional methods. Building on this work, we introduce a new GNN variant that linearly connects graph attention layers, allowing us to train much larger models than previously used for WNV forecasting. This architecture specializes general densely connected GNNs so that the model focuses more heavily on local information to prevent over smoothing. To support training large GNNs we compiled a massive new dataset of weather data, land use information, and mosquito trap results across Illinois. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms both GNN and classical baselines in both out-of-sample and out-of-graph WNV prediction skill across a variety of scenarios and over all prediction horizons.