Built environment supports all the daily activities and shapes our health. Leveraging informative street view imagery, previous research has established the profound correlation between the built environment and chronic, non-communicable diseases; however, predicting the exposure risk of infectious diseases remains largely unexplored. The person-to-person contacts and interactions contribute to the complexity of infectious disease, which is inherently different from non-communicable diseases. Besides, the complex relationships between street view imagery and epidemic exposure also hinder accurate predictions. To address these problems, we construct a regional mobility graph informed by the gravity model, based on which we propose a transmission-aware graph convolutional network (GCN) to capture disease transmission patterns arising from human mobility. Experiments show that the proposed model significantly outperforms baseline models by 8.54% in weighted F1, shedding light on a low-cost, scalable approach to assess epidemic exposure risks from street view imagery.

Published in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023