Weather Forecasting is an attractive challengeable task due to its influence on human life and complexity in atmospheric motion. Supported by massive historical observed time series data, the task is suitable for data-driven approaches, especially deep neural networks. Recently, the Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) based methods have achieved excellent performance for spatio-temporal forecasting. However, the canonical GNNs-based methods only individually model the local graph of meteorological variables per station or the global graph of whole stations, lacking information interaction between meteorological variables in different stations. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network (HiSTGNN) to model cross-regional spatio-temporal correlations among meteorological variables in multiple stations. An adaptive graph learning layer and spatial graph convolution are employed to construct self-learning graph and study hidden dependency among nodes of variable-level and station-level graph. For capturing temporal pattern, the dilated inception as the backbone of gate temporal convolution is designed to model long and various meteorological trends. Moreover, a dynamic interaction learning is proposed to build bidirectional information passing in hierarchical graph. Experimental results on three real-world meteorological datasets demonstrate the superior performance of HiSTGNN beyond 7 baselines and it reduces the errors by 4.2% to 11.6% especially compared to state-of-the-art weather forecasting method.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a prominent approach to machine learning with graphs and have been increasingly applied in a multitude of domains. Nevertheless, since most existing GNN models are based on flat message-passing mechanisms, two limitations need to be tackled: (i) they are costly in encoding long-range information spanning the graph structure; (ii) they are failing to encode features in the high-order neighbourhood in the graphs as they only perform information aggregation across the observed edges in the original graph. To deal with these two issues, we propose a novel Hierarchical Message-passing Graph Neural Networks framework. The key idea is generating a hierarchical structure that re-organises all nodes in a flat graph into multi-level super graphs, along with innovative intra- and inter-level propagation manners. The derived hierarchy creates shortcuts connecting far-away nodes so that informative long-range interactions can be efficiently accessed via message passing and incorporates meso- and macro-level semantics into the learned node representations. We present the first model to implement this framework, termed Hierarchical Community-aware Graph Neural Network (HC-GNN), with the assistance of a hierarchical community detection algorithm. The theoretical analysis illustrates HC-GNN's remarkable capacity in capturing long-range information without introducing heavy additional computation complexity. Empirical experiments conducted on 9 datasets under transductive, inductive, and few-shot settings exhibit that HC-GNN can outperform state-of-the-art GNN models in network analysis tasks, including node classification, link prediction, and community detection. Moreover, the model analysis further demonstrates HC-GNN's robustness facing graph sparsity and the flexibility in incorporating different GNN encoders.
The Internet is composed of networks, called Autonomous Systems (or, ASes), interconnected to each other, thus forming a large graph. While both the AS-graph is known and there is a multitude of data available for the ASes (i.e., node attributes), the research on applying graph machine learning (ML) methods on Internet data has not attracted a lot of attention. In this work, we provide a benchmarking framework aiming to facilitate research on Internet data using graph-ML and graph neural network (GNN) methods. Specifically, we compile a dataset with heterogeneous node/AS attributes by collecting data from multiple online sources, and preprocessing them so that they can be easily used as input in GNN architectures. Then, we create a framework/pipeline for applying GNNs on the compiled data. For a set of tasks, we perform a benchmarking of different GNN models (as well as, non-GNN ML models) to test their efficiency; our results can serve as a common baseline for future research and provide initial insights for the application of GNNs on Internet data.
Spatio-temporal forecasting is challenging attributing to the high nonlinearity in temporal dynamics as well as complex location-characterized patterns in spatial domains, especially in fields like weather forecasting. Graph convolutions are usually used for modeling the spatial dependency in meteorology to handle the irregular distribution of sensors' spatial location. In this work, a novel graph-based convolution for imitating the meteorological flows is proposed to capture the local spatial patterns. Based on the assumption of smoothness of location-characterized patterns, we propose conditional local convolution whose shared kernel on nodes' local space is approximated by feedforward networks, with local representations of coordinate obtained by horizon maps into cylindrical-tangent space as its input. The established united standard of local coordinate system preserves the orientation on geography. We further propose the distance and orientation scaling terms to reduce the impacts of irregular spatial distribution. The convolution is embedded in a Recurrent Neural Network architecture to model the temporal dynamics, leading to the Conditional Local Convolution Recurrent Network (CLCRN). Our model is evaluated on real-world weather benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with obvious improvements. We conduct further analysis on local pattern visualization, model's framework choice, advantages of horizon maps and etc.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) draw their strength from explicitly modeling the topological information of structured data. However, existing GNNs suffer from limited capability in capturing the hierarchical graph representation which plays an important role in graph classification. In this paper, we innovatively propose hierarchical graph capsule network (HGCN) that can jointly learn node embeddings and extract graph hierarchies. Specifically, disentangled graph capsules are established by identifying heterogeneous factors underlying each node, such that their instantiation parameters represent different properties of the same entity. To learn the hierarchical representation, HGCN characterizes the part-whole relationship between lower-level capsules (part) and higher-level capsules (whole) by explicitly considering the structure information among the parts. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of HGCN and the contribution of each component.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has demonstrated the superior performance in many challenging applications, including the few-shot learning tasks. Despite its powerful capacity to learn and generalize from few samples, GNN usually suffers from severe over-fitting and over-smoothing as the model becomes deep, which limit the model scalability. In this work, we propose a novel Attentive GNN to tackle these challenges, by incorporating a triple-attention mechanism, \ie node self-attention, neighborhood attention, and layer memory attention. We explain why the proposed attentive modules can improve GNN for few-shot learning with theoretical analysis and illustrations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Attentive GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art GNN-based methods for few-shot learning over the mini-ImageNet and Tiered-ImageNet datasets, with both inductive and transductive settings.
Modeling multivariate time series has long been a subject that has attracted researchers from a diverse range of fields including economics, finance, and traffic. A basic assumption behind multivariate time series forecasting is that its variables depend on one another but, upon looking closely, it is fair to say that existing methods fail to fully exploit latent spatial dependencies between pairs of variables. In recent years, meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high capability in handling relational dependencies. GNNs require well-defined graph structures for information propagation which means they cannot be applied directly for multivariate time series where the dependencies are not known in advance. In this paper, we propose a general graph neural network framework designed specifically for multivariate time series data. Our approach automatically extracts the uni-directed relations among variables through a graph learning module, into which external knowledge like variable attributes can be easily integrated. A novel mix-hop propagation layer and a dilated inception layer are further proposed to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies within the time series. The graph learning, graph convolution, and temporal convolution modules are jointly learned in an end-to-end framework. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on 3 of 4 benchmark datasets and achieves on-par performance with other approaches on two traffic datasets which provide extra structural information.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have drawn considerable attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous graph related tasks. However, existing GNN models mainly focus on designing graph convolution operations. The graph pooling (or downsampling) operations, that play an important role in learning hierarchical representations, are usually overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling operator, called Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Structure Learning (HGP-SL), which can be integrated into various graph neural network architectures. HGP-SL incorporates graph pooling and structure learning into a unified module to generate hierarchical representations of graphs. More specifically, the graph pooling operation adaptively selects a subset of nodes to form an induced subgraph for the subsequent layers. To preserve the integrity of graph's topological information, we further introduce a structure learning mechanism to learn a refined graph structure for the pooled graph at each layer. By combining HGP-SL operator with graph neural networks, we perform graph level representation learning with focus on graph classification task. Experimental results on six widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
Graphs, which describe pairwise relations between objects, are essential representations of many real-world data such as social networks. In recent years, graph neural networks, which extend the neural network models to graph data, have attracted increasing attention. Graph neural networks have been applied to advance many different graph related tasks such as reasoning dynamics of the physical system, graph classification, and node classification. Most of the existing graph neural network models have been designed for static graphs, while many real-world graphs are inherently dynamic. For example, social networks are naturally evolving as new users joining and new relations being created. Current graph neural network models cannot utilize the dynamic information in dynamic graphs. However, the dynamic information has been proven to enhance the performance of many graph analytical tasks such as community detection and link prediction. Hence, it is necessary to design dedicated graph neural networks for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DGNN, a new {\bf D}ynamic {\bf G}raph {\bf N}eural {\bf N}etwork model, which can model the dynamic information as the graph evolving. In particular, the proposed framework can keep updating node information by capturing the sequential information of edges, the time intervals between edges and information propagation coherently. Experimental results on various dynamic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.