  Accurately predicting individual-level infection state is of great value
since its essential role in reducing the damage of the epidemic. However, there
exists an inescapable risk of privacy leakage in the fine-grained user mobility
trajectories required by individual-level infection prediction. In this paper,
we focus on developing a framework of privacy-preserving individual-level
infection prediction based on federated learning (FL) and graph neural networks
(GNN). We propose Falcon, a Federated grAph Learning method for
privacy-preserving individual-level infeCtion predictiON. It utilizes a novel
hypergraph structure with spatio-temporal hyperedges to describe the complex
interactions between individuals and locations in the contagion process. By
organically combining the FL framework with hypergraph neural networks, the
information propagation process of the graph machine learning is able to be
divided into two stages distributed on the server and the clients,
respectively, so as to effectively protect user privacy while transmitting
high-level information. Furthermore, it elaborately designs a differential
privacy perturbation mechanism as well as a plausible pseudo location
generation approach to preserve user privacy in the graph structure. Besides,
it introduces a cooperative coupling mechanism between the individual-level
prediction model and an additional region-level model to mitigate the
detrimental impacts caused by the injected obfuscation mechanisms. Extensive
experimental results show that our methodology outperforms state-of-the-art
algorithms and is able to protect user privacy against actual privacy attacks.
Our code and datasets are available at the link:
https://github.com/wjfu99/FL-epidemic.
