Effective Urban Region Representation Learning Using Heterogeneous Urban Graph Attention Network (HUGAT)

TL;DR

HUGAT is a novel heterogeneous urban graph attention network that effectively captures diverse urban data sources, including geo-spatial and mobility variations, to improve urban region representation and prediction tasks.

Contribution

This work introduces HUGAT, a new model that integrates heterogeneous urban datasets using meta-paths and attention mechanisms for enhanced urban region analysis.

Findings

HUGAT outperforms state-of-the-art models on NYC data.

It generalizes well across crime, income, and bike flow prediction tasks.

Demonstrates robustness in spatial clustering tasks.

Abstract

Revealing the hidden patterns shaping the urban environment is essential to understand its dynamics and to make cities smarter. Recent studies have demonstrated that learning the representations of urban regions can be an effective strategy to uncover the intrinsic characteristics of urban areas. However, existing studies lack in incorporating diversity in urban data sources. In this work, we propose heterogeneous urban graph attention network (HUGAT), which incorporates heterogeneity of diverse urban datasets. In HUGAT, heterogeneous urban graph (HUG) incorporates both the geo-spatial and temporal people movement variations in a single graph structure. Given a HUG, a set of meta-paths are designed to capture the rich urban semantics as composite relations between nodes. Region embedding is carried out using heterogeneous graph attention network (HAN). HUGAT is designed to consider multiple learning objectives of city's geo-spatial and mobility variations simultaneously. In our extensive experiments on NYC data, HUGAT outperformed all the state-of-the-art models. Moreover, it demonstrated a robust generalization capability across the various prediction tasks of crime, average personal income, and bike flow as well as the spatial clustering task.