An Epidemiological Neural Network Exploiting Dynamic Graph Structured Data Applied to the COVID-19 Outbreak

With the recent COVID-19 outbreak, we have assisted to the development of new epidemic models or the application of existing methodologies to predict the virus spread and to analyze how the different lock-down strategies can effectively influence the epidemic diffusion. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning based framework able to estimate the parameters of any epidemiological model, such as contact rates and recovery rates, based on static and dynamic features of places. In particular, we model mobility data through a graph series whose spatial and temporal features are investigated by combining Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs) and Long short-term memories (LSTMs) in order to infer the parameters of SIR and SIRD models. We evaluate the proposed approach using data related to the COVID-19 dynamics in Italy and we compare the forecasts of the trained model with available data about the epidemic spread.