• DOI:10.1145/3550272
• Corpus ID: 233864462

Modeling the Geospatial Evolution of COVID-19 using Spatio-temporal Convolutional Sequence-to-sequence Neural Networks

@article{Cardoso2021ModelingTG,
  title={Modeling the Geospatial Evolution of COVID-19 using Spatio-temporal Convolutional Sequence-to-sequence Neural Networks},
  author={M{\'a}rio Cardoso and Andr{\'e}a de F{\'a}tima Cavalheiro and Alexandre Borges and Ana F. Duarte and Am{\'i}lcar Soares and Maria Jo{\~a}o Pereira and Nuno Jardim Nunes and Leonardo Azevedo and Arlindo L. Oliveira},
  journal={ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems},
  year={2021},
  volume={8},
  pages={1 - 19}
}

• Mário Cardoso, A. Cavalheiro, +6 authors Arlindo L. Oliveira
• Published 6 May 2021
• Biology
• ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems

Europe was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and Portugal was severely affected, having suffered three waves in the first twelve months. Approximately between January 19th and February 5th 2021 Portugal was the country in the world with the largest incidence rate, with 14-day incidence rates per 100,000 inhabitants in excess of 1,000. Despite its importance, accurate prediction of the geospatial evolution of COVID-19 remains a challenge, since existing analytical methods fail to capture the complex dynamics that result from the contagion within a region and the spreading of the infection from infected neighboring regions. We use a previously developed methodology and official municipality level data from the Portuguese Directorate-General for Health (DGS), relative to the first twelve months of the pandemic, to compute an estimate of the incidence rate in each location of mainland Portugal. The resulting sequence of incidence rate maps was then used as a gold standard to test the effectiveness of different approaches in the prediction of the spatial-temporal evolution of the incidence rate. Four different methods were tested: a simple cell level autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model, a cell level vector autoregressive (VAR) model, a municipality-by-municipality compartmental SIRD model followed by direct block sequential simulation, and a new convolutional sequence-to-sequence neural network model based on the STConvS2S architecture. We conclude that the modified convolutional sequence-to-sequence neural network is the best performing method in this task, when compared with the ARMA, VAR, and SIRD models, as well as with the baseline ConvLSTM model.