Score-Based Generative Data Assimilation for Integrating Aggregated Surveillance Data into Agent-Based Models in Epidemic Tracking

Abstract

Reliable epidemic monitoring often requires inferring regional infection burden and transmission heterogeneity from noisy, spatially aggregated, and potentially sparse surveillance data. Agent-based models (ABMs) are attractive for this task because they represent individual behavior, contact heterogeneity, and localized interventions, but these same features make them difficult to calibrate online. We develop a generative AI-based data-assimilation (GenDA) framework for partially observed epidemic ABMs that estimates both the epidemic state and a heterogeneous parameter field while respecting the gap between observable macrostates and latent agent-level microstates. GenDA combines a training-free, score-based generative update for macrostate correction with a direct parameter update based on macrostate discrepancies, followed by a macro-micro reassignment step that restores consistency with the ABM. In controlled and geographically explicit synthetic experiments, the framework recovers regional epidemic burden, dominant hotspot structures, and effective transmission heterogeneity from aggregated observations, while improving post-assimilation forecasts relative to state-only assimilation.