Learning and Forecasting Multiscale Spatiotemporal Epidemic Dynamics with Lagrangian-Eulerian Graph Neural ODEs

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Abstract:Accurate medium- to long-range epidemic forecasting requires extrapolating high-dimensional, heterogeneous and nonstationary dynamics from partial observations. Yet hybrid models often leave implicit which observations inform which epidemic processes and how learned graph interactions modify system state. We introduce LE-EpiGNODE, which replaces generic message passing with process-specific, mechanism-guided neural operators: age-contact information drives Lagrangian infection generation, whereas mobility drives conservative Eulerian population transport within a structure-preserving universal differential equation. We evaluated LE-EpiGNODE across 14 controlled synthetic mechanisms spanning time-modulated, state-dependent, nonlinear and coupled dynamics, three complementary COVID-19 settings, 21 comparator models and five targeted ablations. Forecasting gains tended to become more pronounced at longer horizons; at the longest horizon, LE-EpiGNODE achieved the lowest WMAPE in all three real-world datasets, reducing error by 17.7-40.0% relative to the best baseline. Controlled ablations linked these gains to the Lagrangian-Eulerian decomposition and process-aligned priors, while synthetic ground truth showed that learned operators and induced state fluxes track known generating dynamics. These results support mechanism-organized graph neural dynamics as a route to reliable long-horizon extrapolation with directly testable, process-level mechanistic interpretation beyond trajectory accuracy.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.21223 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.21223v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21223 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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