Leveraging graph neural networks and mobility data for COVID-19 forecasting

The COVID-19 pandemic has victimized over 7 million people to date, prompting diverse research efforts. Spatio-temporal models combining mobility data with machine learning have gained attention for disease forecasting. Here, we explore Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (GCRN) and Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (GCLSTM), which combine the power of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) with traditional architectures that deal with sequential data. The aim is to forecast future values of COVID-19 cases in Brazil and China by leveraging human mobility networks, whose nodes represent geographical locations and links are flows of vehicles or people. We show that employing backbone extraction to filter out negligible connections in the mobility network enhances predictive stability. Comparing regression and classification tasks demonstrates that binary classification yields smoother, more interpretable results. Interestingly, we observe qualitatively equivalent results for both Brazil and China datasets by introducing sliding windows of variable size and prediction horizons. Compared to prior studies, introducing the sliding window and the network backbone extraction strategies yields improvements of about 80% in root mean squared errors.