RegionGCN: Spatial-Heterogeneity-Aware Graph Convolutional Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Guo, Hao, Wang, Han, Zhu, Di, Wu, Lun, Fotheringham, A. Stewart, Liu, Yu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Guo, Hao
Wang, Han
Zhu, Di
Wu, Lun
Fotheringham, A. Stewart
Liu, Yu
author_facet Guo, Hao
Wang, Han
Zhu, Di
Wu, Lun
Fotheringham, A. Stewart
Liu, Yu
contents Modeling spatial heterogeneity in the data generation process is essential for understanding and predicting geographical phenomena. Despite their prevalence in geospatial tasks, neural network models usually assume spatial stationarity, which could limit their performance in the presence of spatial process heterogeneity. By allowing model parameters to vary over space, several approaches have been proposed to incorporate spatial heterogeneity into neural networks. However, current geographically weighting approaches are ineffective on graph neural networks, yielding no significant improvement in prediction accuracy. We assume the crux lies in the over-fitting risk brought by a large number of local parameters. Accordingly, we propose to model spatial process heterogeneity at the regional level rather than at the individual level, which largely reduces the number of spatially varying parameters. We further develop a heuristic optimization procedure to learn the region partition adaptively in the process of model training. Our proposed spatial-heterogeneity-aware graph convolutional network, named RegionGCN, is applied to the spatial prediction of county-level vote share in the 2016 US presidential election based on socioeconomic attributes. Results show that RegionGCN achieves significant improvement over the basic and geographically weighted GCNs. We also offer an exploratory analysis tool for the spatial variation of non-linear relationships through ensemble learning of regional partitions from RegionGCN. Our work contributes to the practice of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in tackling spatial heterogeneity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_17599
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RegionGCN: Spatial-Heterogeneity-Aware Graph Convolutional Networks
Guo, Hao
Wang, Han
Zhu, Di
Wu, Lun
Fotheringham, A. Stewart
Liu, Yu
Machine Learning
Modeling spatial heterogeneity in the data generation process is essential for understanding and predicting geographical phenomena. Despite their prevalence in geospatial tasks, neural network models usually assume spatial stationarity, which could limit their performance in the presence of spatial process heterogeneity. By allowing model parameters to vary over space, several approaches have been proposed to incorporate spatial heterogeneity into neural networks. However, current geographically weighting approaches are ineffective on graph neural networks, yielding no significant improvement in prediction accuracy. We assume the crux lies in the over-fitting risk brought by a large number of local parameters. Accordingly, we propose to model spatial process heterogeneity at the regional level rather than at the individual level, which largely reduces the number of spatially varying parameters. We further develop a heuristic optimization procedure to learn the region partition adaptively in the process of model training. Our proposed spatial-heterogeneity-aware graph convolutional network, named RegionGCN, is applied to the spatial prediction of county-level vote share in the 2016 US presidential election based on socioeconomic attributes. Results show that RegionGCN achieves significant improvement over the basic and geographically weighted GCNs. We also offer an exploratory analysis tool for the spatial variation of non-linear relationships through ensemble learning of regional partitions from RegionGCN. Our work contributes to the practice of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in tackling spatial heterogeneity.
title RegionGCN: Spatial-Heterogeneity-Aware Graph Convolutional Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17599