---
title: "Prior Knowledge-enhanced Spatio-temporal Epidemic Forecasting"
authors:
  - "Sijie Ruan"
  - "Jinyu Li"
  - "Jia Wei"
  - "Zenghao Xu"
  - "Jie Bao"
  - "Junshi Xu"
  - "Junyang Qiu"
  - "Shuliang Wang"
  - "Xiaoxiao Wang"
  - "Hanning Yuan"
doi: "10.24963/ijcai.2026/764"
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/764"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/0764.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2026
pages: "6868-6876"
track: "AI and Health"
keywords:
  - "Public health: Public health"
  - "Timeseries prediction: Timeseries prediction"
---

# Prior Knowledge-enhanced Spatio-temporal Epidemic Forecasting

Sijie Ruan, Jinyu Li, Jia Wei, Zenghao Xu, Jie Bao, Junshi Xu, Junyang Qiu, Shuliang Wang, Xiaoxiao Wang, Hanning Yuan

*Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 6868-6876. DOI: [10.24963/ijcai.2026/764](https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/764)

## Abstract

Spatio-temporal epidemic forecasting is critical for public health management, yet existing methods often struggle with insensitivity to weak epidemic signals, over-simplified spatial relations, and unstable parameter estimation. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatio-Temporal priOr-aware Epidemic Predictor (STOEP), a novel hybrid framework that integrates implicit spatio-temporal priors and explicit expert priors. STOEP consists of three key components: (1) Case-aware Adjacency Learning (CAL), which dynamically adjusts mobility-based regional dependencies using historical infection patterns; (2) Space-informed Parameter Estimating (SPE), which employs learnable spatial priors to amplify weak epidemic signals; and (3) Filter-based Mechanistic Forecasting (FMF), which uses an expert-guided adaptive thresholding strategy to regularize epidemic parameters. Extensive experiments on real-world COVID-19 and influenza datasets demonstrate that STOEP outperforms the best baseline by 11.1% in RMSE. The system has been deployed at a provincial CDC in China to facilitate downstream applications.