SpatialEpiBench: Benchmarking Spatial Information and Epidemic Priors in Forecasting

ArXi:2605.06530v1 Announce Type: new Accurate epidemic forecasting is crucial for public health response, resource allocation, and outbreak intervention, but remains difficult with sparse, noisy, and highly non-stationary data. Because epidemics unfold across interacting regions, spatiotemporal methods are natural candidates for improving forecasts. Despite growing interest in spatial information, no standardized benchmark exists, and current evaluations often use simple chronological train-test splits that do not reflect real-time forecasting practice.