Road Network Representation Learning with the Third Law of Geography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel graph contrastive learning framework for road network representation that incorporates the Third Law of Geography, improving the quality of road segment embeddings for various tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a new contrastive learning approach that integrates the Third Law of Geography into road network embedding, addressing limitations of previous methods focused on the First Law.

Findings

Enhanced representation quality in downstream tasks

Effective incorporation of geographic configuration principles

Significant performance improvements demonstrated

Abstract

Road network representation learning aims to learn compressed and effective vectorized representations for road segments that are applicable to numerous tasks. In this paper, we identify the limitations of existing methods, particularly their overemphasis on the distance effect as outlined in the First Law of Geography. In response, we propose to endow road network representation with the principles of the recent Third Law of Geography. To this end, we propose a novel graph contrastive learning framework that employs geographic configuration-aware graph augmentation and spectral negative sampling, ensuring that road segments with similar geographic configurations yield similar representations, and vice versa, aligning with the principles stated in the Third Law. The framework further fuses the Third Law with the First Law through a dual contrastive learning objective to effectively balance the implications of both laws. We evaluate our framework on two real-world datasets across three downstream tasks. The results show that the integration of the Third Law significantly improves the performance of road segment representations in downstream tasks.