Prediction of Spread Trend of Epidemic Based on Spatial-Temporal Sequence

Abstract

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to spread throughout the world, and it is necessary for us to implement effective methods to prevent and control the spread of the epidemic. In this paper, we propose a new model called Spatial–Temporal Attention Graph Convolutional Networks (STAGCN) that can analyze the long-term trend of the COVID-19 epidemic with high accuracy. The STAGCN employs a spatial graph attention network layer and a temporal gated attention convolutional network layer to capture the spatial and temporal features of infectious disease data, respectively. While the new model inherits the symmetric “space-time space” structure of Spatial–Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (STGCN), it enhances its ability to identify infectious diseases using spatial–temporal correlation features by replacing the graph convolutional network layer with a graph attention network layer that can pay more attention to important features based on adaptively adjusted feature weights at different time points. The experimental results show that our model has the lowest error rate compared to other models. The paper also analyzes the prediction results of the model using interpretable analysis methods to provide a more reliable guide for the decision-making process during epidemic prevention and control.