A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Architectures for Multi-Horizon Behavioural Forecasting for Mobile Health

Wearable devices and smartphones generate rich behavioural time series that can support proactive health interventions, yet systematic comparisons of modern forecasting architectures for these data are lacking. In particular, it remains unclear how models generalise across populations, how different architectures respond to participant-level fine-tuning and how forecasting accuracy degrades across multi-day horizons. We benchmark six deep learning architectures, two zero-shot Foundation Models (FM) and statistical baselines on three public datasets encompassing over 800 participants, reporting per-feature metrics for step counts, screen time and sleep duration across 1-8 day horizons. We further conduct a per-feature personalisation study across all six architectures and assess FM transferability across dataset sizes and temporal granularities. Our key findings are: (i) no single architecture dominates, PatchTST leads among trained models while the three runners-up (TCN, MLP, Transformer) show no meaningful performance difference; (ii) the FM TimesFM matches or exceeds trained models zero-shot, especially in low-data regimes and (iii) participant-level fine-tuning reduces per-feature RMSE by 16-60\%, with sleep benefiting most and step counts least. These results provide practical guidance on architecture selection, FM applicability and personalisation strategies for mobile health forecasting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to jointly evaluate modern deep learning, FMs and personalisation for multi-horizon behavioural forecasting from wearables.

Cross-Country Learning for National Infectious Disease Forecasting Using European Data

Accurate forecasting of infectious disease incidence is critical for public health planning and timely intervention. While most data-driven forecasting approaches rely primarily on historical data from a single country, such data are often limited in length and variability, restricting the performance of machine learning (ML) models. In this work, we investigate a cross-country learning approach for infectious disease forecasting, in which a single model is trained on time series data from multiple countries and evaluated on a country of interest. This setting enables the model to exploit shared epidemic dynamics across countries and to benefit from an enlarged training set. We examine this approach through a case study on COVID-19 case forecasting in Cyprus, using surveillance data from European countries. We evaluate multiple ML models and analyse the impact of the lookback window length and cross-country `data augmentation' on multi-step forecasting performance. Our results show that incorporating data from other countries can lead to consistent improvements over models trained solely on national data. Although the empirical focus is on Cyprus and COVID-19, the proposed framework and findings are applicable to infectious disease forecasting more broadly, particularly in settings with limited national historical data.