Crowd Flow Prediction for Irregular Regions with Semantic Graph Attention Network

Abstract

It is essential to predict crowd flow precisely in a city, which is practically partitioned into irregular regions based on road networks and functionality. However, prior works mainly focus on grid-based crowd flow prediction, where a city is divided into many regular grids. Although Convolutional Neural Netwok (CNN) is powerful to capture spatial dependence from grid-based Euclidean data, it fails to tackle non-Euclidean data, which reflect the correlations among irregular regions. Besides, prior works fail to jointly capture the hierarchical spatio-temporal dependence from both regular and irregular regions. Finally, the correlations among regions are time-varying and functionality-related. However, the combination of dynamic and semantic attributes of regions are ignored by related works. To address the above challenges, in this article, we propose a novel model to tackle the flow prediction task for irregular regions. First, we employ CNN and Graph Neural Network (GNN) to capture micro and macro spatial dependence among grid-based regions and irregular regions, respectively. Further, we think highly of the dynamic inter-region correlations and propose a location-aware and time-aware graph attention mechanism named Semantic Graph Attention Network (Semantic-GAT), based on dynamic node attribute embedding and multi-view graph reconstruction. Extensive experimental results based on two real-life datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms 10 baselines by reducing the prediction error around 8%.