Conformalized Physics-Informed Weak Regression for Parameter Estimation in Epidemic Models

Allan Peter Engsig-Karup

Compartment models of infectious diseases are often linear in coefficients that are physical parameters or products or ratios of them. We exploit this with closed-form least squares and equip the estimates with distribution-free uncertainty. Physics-informed regression (PIR) fits the parameters to finite-difference derivatives of the data; we introduce physics-informed weak regression (PIWR), which integrates the model in time instead, needs no derivatives of the data, estimates the initial state jointly and is high-order accurate. To quantify uncertainty we wrap both estimators in split conformal prediction, with a calibration population generated by the physics-based model itself, giving simultaneous intervals for all parameters with a finite-sample coverage guarantee. A residual-adaptive factor, computed without ground truth, scales the intervals to each data set (PIWR-RACC). On the eleven benchmark models of disease-informed neural networks (DINNs), PIWR or PIR-FD6 is one to four orders of magnitude more accurate than the reported DINN results wherever the sampling resolves the dynamics, in about a millisecond per fit instead of minutes to hours of training, and the 90%…