arXiv:2606.19560cs.LG2026-06被引 1

对比多种模型在流感预测中的表现,发现融合多个预训练模型效果最佳。

Understanding Key Features of Time Series Foundation Models from Epidemic Forecasting

论文配图:Understanding Key Features of Time Series Foundation Models from Epidemic Forecasting
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用混合专家模型融合多个预训练预测器,提升预测性能。
  • 预训练在长时序预测中优势明显,尤其当预训练数据与流感机制一致时。
  • 住院数据作为辅助信号可增强多时序预测鲁棒性,适合公共卫生决策。

季节性流感每年在美国感染数百万人,造成重大疾病负担和死亡率,因此短期预测是核心公共健康需求。可靠的流行病时间序列预测可指导疫苗接种时机、医院人力配置和资源分配,但现代预测架构在传染病监测数据上的表现仍缺乏充分评估。本文通过系统评估,在1-4周前瞻预测下,基于流感样病例监测和流感相关住院时间序列,考察了经典神经网络、数值型Transformer模型、预训练时间序列基础模型及基于大语言模型的预测方法在时空泛化场景下的表现。结果表明,融合多个预训练预测器的混合专家模型整体表现最优,说明异质预训练表征提供互补信息;数值型Transformer模型能生成可靠预测,且预训练在长时序预测中带来最大增益,尤其当预训练领域与流感动力学机制一致时;而基于大语言模型的方法在此任务中表现逊于数值型模型。此外,我们研究了住院数据作为辅助协变量和预训练源的作用,发现其在特定场景下可提供互补改进,并明确额外监测流如何增强多时序预测的稳健性。这些发现为流感应对中的模型选择、预训练策略及辅助信号使用提供了可操作建议。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Seasonal influenza infects millions of people and causes substantial morbidity and mortality in the United States each year, making accurate short-term forecasting a core public-health need. Reliable forecasts of epidemic time series can inform vaccination timing, hospital staffing, and resource allocation, yet the comparative behavior of modern forecasting architectures on infectious-disease surveillance data remains insufficiently characterized. We address this gap through a systematic evaluation of regional influenza forecasting using influenza-like illness surveillance and influenza-associated hospitalization time series under both temporal and spatial generalization settings for 1-4-week-ahead prediction. We compare classical neural network architectures, numerical transformer-based models, pretrained time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasting approaches. Across tasks, we demonstrate that a mixture-of-experts model that fuses multiple pretrained forecasters achieves the strongest overall performance, indicating that heterogeneous pretrained representations provide complementary predictive information. Our results further show that numerical transformer-based models produce reliable forecasts, while pretraining provides the largest gains at longer horizons, particularly when the pretraining domain is mechanistically aligned with influenza dynamics. In contrast, LLM-based time series methods underperform relative to numerical forecasters in this setting. Finally, we examine hospitalization information as both an auxiliary covariate and a pretraining source. Hospitalization signals provide complementary improvements in selected settings and clarify when additional surveillance streams enhance the robustness of multi-horizon forecasting. These findings provide actionable guidance on model selection, pretraining strategy, and auxiliary-signal use for influenza preparedness.

流感预测时间序列预训练模型多模型融合

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