Accurately forecasting transportation demand is crucial for efficient urban traffic guidance, control and management. One solution to enhance the level of prediction accuracy is to leverage graph convolutional networks (GCN), a neural network based modelling approach with the ability to process data contained in graph based structures. As a powerful extension of GCN, a spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) aims to capture the relationship of data contained in the graphical nodes across both spatial and temporal dimensions, which presents a novel deep learning paradigm for the analysis of complex time-series data that also involves spatial information as present in transportation use cases. In this paper, we present an Attention-based ST-GCN (AST-GCN) for predicting the number of available bikes in bike-sharing systems in cities, where the attention-based mechanism is introduced to further improve the performance of an ST-GCN. Furthermore, we also discuss the impacts of different modelling methods of adjacency matrices on the proposed architecture. Our experimental results are presented using two real-world datasets, Dublinbikes and NYC-Citi Bike, to illustrate the efficacy of our proposed model which outperforms the majority of existing approaches.
Most of existing statistical theories on deep neural networks have sample complexities cursed by the data dimension and therefore cannot well explain the empirical success of deep learning on high-dimensional data. To bridge this gap, we propose to exploit low-dimensional geometric structures of the real world data sets. We establish theoretical guarantees of convolutional residual networks (ConvResNet) in terms of function approximation and statistical estimation for binary classification. Specifically, given the data lying on a $d$-dimensional manifold isometrically embedded in $\mathbb{R}^D$, we prove that if the network architecture is properly chosen, ConvResNets can (1) approximate Besov functions on manifolds with arbitrary accuracy, and (2) learn a classifier by minimizing the empirical logistic risk, which gives an excess risk in the order of $n^{-\frac{s}{2s+2(s\vee d)}}$, where $s$ is a smoothness parameter. This implies that the sample complexity depends on the intrinsic dimension $d$, instead of the data dimension $D$. Our results demonstrate that ConvResNets are adaptive to low-dimensional structures of data sets.
Sequential recommendation aims to leverage users' historical behaviors to predict their next interaction. Existing works have not yet addressed two main challenges in sequential recommendation. First, user behaviors in their rich historical sequences are often implicit and noisy preference signals, they cannot sufficiently reflect users' actual preferences. In addition, users' dynamic preferences often change rapidly over time, and hence it is difficult to capture user patterns in their historical sequences. In this work, we propose a graph neural network model called SURGE (short for SeqUential Recommendation with Graph neural nEtworks) to address these two issues. Specifically, SURGE integrates different types of preferences in long-term user behaviors into clusters in the graph by re-constructing loose item sequences into tight item-item interest graphs based on metric learning. This helps explicitly distinguish users' core interests, by forming dense clusters in the interest graph. Then, we perform cluster-aware and query-aware graph convolutional propagation and graph pooling on the constructed graph. It dynamically fuses and extracts users' current activated core interests from noisy user behavior sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and proprietary industrial datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains of our proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. Further studies on sequence length confirm that our method can model long behavioral sequences effectively and efficiently.
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has been widely applied in transportation demand prediction due to its excellent ability to capture non-Euclidean spatial dependence among station-level or regional transportation demands. However, in most of the existing research, the graph convolution was implemented on a heuristically generated adjacency matrix, which could neither reflect the real spatial relationships of stations accurately, nor capture the multi-level spatial dependence of demands adaptively. To cope with the above problems, this paper provides a novel graph convolutional network for transportation demand prediction. Firstly, a novel graph convolution architecture is proposed, which has different adjacency matrices in different layers and all the adjacency matrices are self-learned during the training process. Secondly, a layer-wise coupling mechanism is provided, which associates the upper-level adjacency matrix with the lower-level one. It also reduces the scale of parameters in our model. Lastly, a unitary network is constructed to give the final prediction result by integrating the hidden spatial states with gated recurrent unit, which could capture the multi-level spatial dependence and temporal dynamics simultaneously. Experiments have been conducted on two real-world datasets, NYC Citi Bike and NYC Taxi, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our model over the state-of-the-art ones.
Traffic forecasting is of great importance to transportation management and public safety, and very challenging due to the complicated spatial-temporal dependency and essential uncertainty brought about by the road network and traffic conditions. Latest studies mainly focus on modeling the spatial dependency by utilizing graph convolutional networks (GCNs) throughout a fixed weighted graph. However, edges, i.e., the correlations between pair-wise nodes, are much more complicated and interact with each other. In this paper, we propose the Multi-Range Attentive Bicomponent GCN (MRA-BGCN), a novel deep learning model for traffic forecasting. We first build the node-wise graph according to the road network distance and the edge-wise graph according to various edge interaction patterns. Then, we implement the interactions of both nodes and edges using bicomponent graph convolution. The multi-range attention mechanism is introduced to aggregate information in different neighborhood ranges and automatically learn the importance of different ranges. Extensive experiments on two real-world road network traffic datasets, METR-LA and PEMS-BAY, show that our MRA-BGCN achieves the state-of-the-art results.
Graph or network data is ubiquitous in the real world, including social networks, information networks, traffic networks, biological networks and various technical networks. The non-Euclidean nature of graph data poses the challenge for modeling and analyzing graph data. Recently, Graph Neural Network (GNNs) are proposed as a general and powerful framework to handle tasks on graph data, e.g., node embedding, link prediction and node classification. As a representative implementation of GNNs, Graph Attention Networks (GATs) are successfully applied in a variety of tasks on real datasets. However, GAT is designed to networks with only positive links and fails to handle signed networks which contain both positive and negative links. In this paper, we propose Signed Graph Attention Networks (SiGATs), generalizing GAT to signed networks. SiGAT incorporates graph motifs into GAT to capture two well-known theories in signed network research, i.e., balance theory and status theory. In SiGAT, motifs offer us the flexible structural pattern to aggregate and propagate messages on the signed network to generate node embeddings. We evaluate the proposed SiGAT method by applying it to the signed link prediction task. Experimental results on three real datasets demonstrate that SiGAT outperforms feature-based method, network embedding method and state-of-the-art GNN-based methods like signed graph convolutional network (SGCN).
Graph embedding is an important approach for graph analysis tasks such as node classification and link prediction. The goal of graph embedding is to find a low dimensional representation of graph nodes that preserves the graph information. Recent methods like Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) try to consider node attributes (if available) besides node relations and learn node embeddings for unsupervised and semi-supervised tasks on graphs. On the other hand, multi-layer graph analysis has been received attention recently. However, the existing methods for multi-layer graph embedding cannot incorporate all available information (like node attributes). Moreover, most of them consider either type of nodes or type of edges, and they do not treat within and between layer edges differently. In this paper, we propose a method called MGCN that utilizes the GCN for multi-layer graphs. MGCN embeds nodes of multi-layer graphs using both within and between layers relations and nodes attributes. We evaluate our method on the semi-supervised node classification task. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to other multi-layer and single-layer competitors and also show the positive effect of using cross-layer edges.
Attributed graph clustering is challenging as it requires joint modelling of graph structures and node attributes. Recent progress on graph convolutional networks has proved that graph convolution is effective in combining structural and content information, and several recent methods based on it have achieved promising clustering performance on some real attributed networks. However, there is limited understanding of how graph convolution affects clustering performance and how to properly use it to optimize performance for different graphs. Existing methods essentially use graph convolution of a fixed and low order that only takes into account neighbours within a few hops of each node, which underutilizes node relations and ignores the diversity of graphs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive graph convolution method for attributed graph clustering that exploits high-order graph convolution to capture global cluster structure and adaptively selects the appropriate order for different graphs. We establish the validity of our method by theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. Empirical results show that our method compares favourably with state-of-the-art methods.
Being able to predict the crowd flows in each and every part of a city, especially in irregular regions, is strategically important for traffic control, risk assessment, and public safety. However, it is very challenging because of interactions and spatial correlations between different regions. In addition, it is affected by many factors: i) multiple temporal correlations among different time intervals: closeness, period, trend; ii) complex external influential factors: weather, events; iii) meta features: time of the day, day of the week, and so on. In this paper, we formulate crowd flow forecasting in irregular regions as a spatio-temporal graph (STG) prediction problem in which each node represents a region with time-varying flows. By extending graph convolution to handle the spatial information, we propose using spatial graph convolution to build a multi-view graph convolutional network (MVGCN) for the crowd flow forecasting problem, where different views can capture different factors as mentioned above. We evaluate MVGCN using four real-world datasets (taxicabs and bikes) and extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms the adaptations of state-of-the-art methods. And we have developed a crowd flow forecasting system for irregular regions that can now be used internally.
We present a new clustering method in the form of a single clustering equation that is able to directly discover groupings in the data. The main proposition is that the first neighbor of each sample is all one needs to discover large chains and finding the groups in the data. In contrast to most existing clustering algorithms our method does not require any hyper-parameters, distance thresholds and/or the need to specify the number of clusters. The proposed algorithm belongs to the family of hierarchical agglomerative methods. The technique has a very low computational overhead, is easily scalable and applicable to large practical problems. Evaluation on well known datasets from different domains ranging between 1077 and 8.1 million samples shows substantial performance gains when compared to the existing clustering techniques.
Tumor growth is associated with cell invasion and mass-effect, which are traditionally formulated by mathematical models, namely reaction-diffusion equations and biomechanics. Such models can be personalized based on clinical measurements to build the predictive models for tumor growth. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) to directly represent and learn the cell invasion and mass-effect, and to predict the subsequent involvement regions of a tumor. The invasion network learns the cell invasion from information related to metabolic rate, cell density and tumor boundary derived from multimodal imaging data. The expansion network models the mass-effect from the growing motion of tumor mass. We also study different architectures that fuse the invasion and expansion networks, in order to exploit the inherent correlations among them. Our network can easily be trained on population data and personalized to a target patient, unlike most previous mathematical modeling methods that fail to incorporate population data. Quantitative experiments on a pancreatic tumor data set show that the proposed method substantially outperforms a state-of-the-art mathematical model-based approach in both accuracy and efficiency, and that the information captured by each of the two subnetworks are complementary.