Data-Driven Approaches for Predicting Spread of Infectious Diseases Through DINNs: Disease Informed Neural Networks

Abstract

In this work, we present an approach called Disease Informed Neural Networks (DINNs) that can be employed to effectively predict the spread of infectious diseases. We build on the application of physics informed neural network (PINNs) to SIR compartmental models and expand it to a scaffolded family of mathematical models describing various infectious diseases. We show how the neural networks are capable of learning how diseases spread, forecasting their progression, and finding their unique parameters (e.g., death rate). To demonstrate the robustness and efficacy of DINNs, we apply the approach to eleven highly infectious diseases that have been modeled in increasing levels of complexity. Our computational experiments suggest that DINNs is a reliable candidate to effectively learn the dynamics of their spread and forecast their progression into the future from available real-world data. Code and data can be found here: https://github.com/Shaier/DINN