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Forecaster: A Graph Transformer for Forecasting Spatial and Time-Dependent Data (arxiv.org)
62 points by jonbaer on Sep 21, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | 8 comments on HN

In plain words: It learns which locations affect each other as a graph, then uses that map to trim a prediction network's connections so it focuses on strong spatial links and long time spans. On taxi ride-hailing demand, it beat the best existing predictors.

Abstract

Spatial and time-dependent data is of interest in many applications. This task is difficult due to its complex spatial dependency, long-range temporal dependency, data non-stationarity, and data heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose Forecaster, a graph Transformer architecture. Specifically, we start by learning the structure of the graph that parsimoniously represents the spatial dependency between the data at different locations. Based on the topology of the graph, we sparsify the Transformer to account for the strength of spatial dependency, long-range temporal dependency, data non-stationarity, and data heterogeneity. We evaluate Forecaster in the problem of forecasting taxi ride-hailing demand and show that our proposed architecture significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

Yang Li, José M. F. Moura
arXiv:1909.04019 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Sep 9, 2019 · updated Feb 21, 2020
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Also discussed: Sep 2019 (1 point, 0 comments)

I have only read the abstract of this paper so far. But the idea of minimal graphs representing the dynamics of a system goes back (at least) to the work of Jim Crutchfield [http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/] in the '80s.
The paper is really novel in terms of embedding the minimal graph into the Transformer for time series forecasting. As far as I know, there is no paper having done that before.
This is very cool stuff. I really appreciate the link.
The baselines they compare to are only other neural network models, rather than models that actually state of the art for time series. This makes the author's abstract rather disingenuous.
The paper has no problem there at all. Many prior papers have demonstrated that neural network models significantly outperform non-neural network models in transportation forecasting like https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01926, http://www-scf.usc.edu/~yaguang/papers/aaai19_multi_graph_co... As this paper has chosen the state-of-the-art neural network models as baselines, it has already done enough and decent jobs on choosing baselines.
Interesting paper. Adapt the Transformer to spatiotemporal forecasting for the first time. SOTA results in taxi demand forecasting.
This paper presents a rather interesting idea that the Transformer, an NLP model, can be modified for spatio-temporal prediction. The first work on applying the Transformer to this domain.
Any implementation yet?