Piecewise Stationary Modeling of Random Processes Over Graphs With an Application to Traffic Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a piecewise stationary model for random processes on graphs, partitioning large graphs into clusters where the process is stationary, improving traffic prediction accuracy with lower computational costs.

Contribution

A novel piecewise stationary graph model with an efficient clustering algorithm for non-stationary processes, applied to traffic prediction.

Findings

Achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art deep learning methods.

Reduces computational complexity significantly.

Effectively models non-stationary processes on large graphs.

Abstract

Stationarity is a key assumption in many statistical models for random processes. With recent developments in the field of graph signal processing, the conventional notion of wide-sense stationarity has been extended to random processes defined on the vertices of graphs. It has been shown that well-known spectral graph kernel methods assume that the underlying random process over a graph is stationary. While many approaches have been proposed, both in machine learning and signal processing literature, to model stationary random processes over graphs, they are too restrictive to characterize real-world datasets as most of them are non-stationary processes. In this paper, to well-characterize a non-stationary process over graph, we propose a novel model and a computationally efficient algorithm that partitions a large graph into disjoint clusters such that the process is stationary on each of the clusters but independent across clusters. We evaluate our model for traffic prediction on a large-scale dataset of fine-grained highway travel times in the Dallas--Fort Worth area. The accuracy of our method is very close to the state-of-the-art graph based deep learning methods while the computational complexity of our model is substantially smaller.