arXiv:2601.11089cs.AI2026-01

用因果发现提升轻量级疫情预测,更好利用嘈杂的移动数据。

MiCA: A Mobility-Informed Causal Adapter for Lightweight Epidemic Forecasting

  • 通过因果发现推断人流关系,以门控残差混合方式融合进时序模型
  • 在4个真实数据集上平均降低7.5%预测误差,优于同类轻量模型
  • 无需图神经网络或全注意力结构,适合数据少、噪声多的场景

准确预测传染病传播对公共卫生规划至关重要。人类流动在塑造疫情空间扩散中起核心作用,但流动数据存在噪声大、间接性强、难以与病例记录可靠整合等问题。同时,病例时间序列通常较短且时间分辨率粗。这些条件限制了依赖清洁充足数据的参数密集型流行病预测模型。本文提出轻量级、架构无关的流动性因果适配器(MiCA),通过因果发现推断流动关系,并以门控残差混合方式将其融入时序预测模型。该设计使轻量级模型能选择性利用流动带来的空间结构,同时在噪声和数据受限条件下保持鲁棒性,无需引入图神经网络或完整注意力机制等重型关系组件。在四个真实世界流行病数据集(包括新冠发病率、死亡率、流感和登革热)上的广泛实验表明,MiCA持续提升轻量级时序骨干模型性能,在不同预测时长下平均相对误差降低7.5%。此外,其性能可与当前最优时空模型媲美,且仍保持轻量特性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Accurate forecasting of infectious disease dynamics is critical for public health planning and intervention. Human mobility plays a central role in shaping the spatial spread of epidemics, but mobility data are noisy, indirect, and difficult to integrate reliably with disease records. Meanwhile, epidemic case time series are typically short and reported at coarse temporal resolution. These conditions limit the effectiveness of parameter-heavy mobility-aware forecasters that rely on clean and abundant data. In this work, we propose the Mobility-Informed Causal Adapter (MiCA), a lightweight and architecture-agnostic module for epidemic forecasting. MiCA infers mobility relations through causal discovery and integrates them into temporal forecasting models via gated residual mixing. This design allows lightweight forecasters to selectively exploit mobility-derived spatial structure while remaining robust under noisy and data-limited conditions, without introducing heavy relational components such as graph neural networks or full attention. Extensive experiments on four real-world epidemic datasets, including COVID-19 incidence, COVID-19 mortality, influenza, and dengue, show that MiCA consistently improves lightweight temporal backbones, achieving an average relative error reduction of 7.5\% across forecasting horizons. Moreover, MiCA attains performance competitive with SOTA spatio-temporal models while remaining lightweight.

疫情预测因果建模轻量化时空建模

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