22nd AIAI 2026, 16 - 19 July 2026, Chania, Crete, Greece

Federated Bayesian Learning for Spatiotemporal Epidemic Modeling

Avraam Alexandros, Mavrikaki Filia, Samoladas Vasilis

Abstract:

  Epidemic monitoring generates large volumes of geographically distributed medical time-series data that are essential for calibrating epidemiological models. However, privacy regulations often prevent the centralization of such sensitive data across healthcare institutions. Federated learning provides a natural framework for collaborative modeling without sharing raw data. In this work, we study federated parameter inference for simulation-based epidemiological models using Approximate Bayesian Computation with Sequential Monte Carlo (ABC-SMC). We propose two Bayesian federated architectures—Federated Bayesian Averaging and Federated Consensus—that enable posterior inference a\-cross distributed data silos without gradient exchange, making them compatible with complex non-differentiable simulators such as EpiSim. Experiments on real COVID-19 mobility and epidemiological data from Spain show that the proposed approaches accurately recover epidemic parameters while preserving data locality and achieving significant computational speedups through distributed execution.  

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