Training-Free Geospatial Place Representation Learning from Large-Scale Point-of-Interest Graph Data

TL;DR

PlaceRep is a training-free method that creates scalable, multi-scale geospatial region embeddings by clustering POIs, outperforming existing methods in efficiency and accuracy for urban analysis tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, training-free approach to geospatial representation learning that automatically identifies meaningful places across multiple spatial scales.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based methods in accuracy.

Achieves up to 100x faster region embedding generation.

Effectively captures human activity and urban function in representations.

Abstract

Learning effective representations of urban environments requires capturing spatial structure beyond fixed administrative boundaries. Existing geospatial representation learning approaches typically aggregate Points of Interest(POI) into pre-defined administrative regions such as census units or ZIP code areas, assigning a single embedding to each region. However, POIs often form semantically meaningful groups that extend across, within, or beyond these boundaries, defining places that better reflect human activity and urban function. To address this limitation, we propose PlaceRep, a training-free geospatial representation learning method that constructs place-level representations by clustering spatially and semantically related POIs. PlaceRep summarizes large-scale POI graphs from U.S. Foursquare data to produce general-purpose urban region embeddings while automatically identifying places across multiple spatial scales. By eliminating model pre-training, PlaceRep provides a scalable and efficient solution for multi-granular geospatial analysis. Experiments using the tasks of population density estimation and housing price prediction as downstream tasks show that PlaceRep outperforms most state-of-the-art graph-based geospatial representation learning methods and achieves up to a 100x speedup in generating region-level representations on large-scale POI graphs. The implementation of PlaceRep is available at https://github.com/mohammadhashemii/PlaceRep.