Causality Enhanced Origin-Destination Flow Prediction in Data-Scarce Cities

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Feng, Tao, Zhang, Yunke, Wang, Huandong, Li, Yong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Feng, Tao
Zhang, Yunke
Wang, Huandong
Li, Yong
author_facet Feng, Tao
Zhang, Yunke
Wang, Huandong
Li, Yong
contents Accurate origin-destination (OD) flow prediction is of great importance to developing cities, as it can contribute to optimize urban structures and layouts. However, with the common issues of missing regional features and lacking OD flow data, it is quite daunting to predict OD flow in developing cities. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Causality-Enhanced OD Flow Prediction (CE-OFP), a unified framework that aims to transfer urban knowledge between cities and achieve accuracy improvements in OD flow predictions across data-scarce cities. In specific, we propose a novel reinforcement learning model to discover universal causalities among urban features in data-rich cities and build corresponding causal graphs. Then, we further build Causality-Enhanced Variational Auto-Encoder (CE-VAE) to incorporate causal graphs for effective feature reconstruction in data-scarce cities. Finally, with the reconstructed features, we devise a knowledge distillation method with a graph attention network to migrate the OD prediction model from data-rich cities to data-scare cities. Extensive experiments on two pairs of real-world datasets validate that the proposed CE-OFP remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, which can reduce the RMSE of OD flow prediction for data-scarce cities by up to 11%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06398
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causality Enhanced Origin-Destination Flow Prediction in Data-Scarce Cities
Feng, Tao
Zhang, Yunke
Wang, Huandong
Li, Yong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Accurate origin-destination (OD) flow prediction is of great importance to developing cities, as it can contribute to optimize urban structures and layouts. However, with the common issues of missing regional features and lacking OD flow data, it is quite daunting to predict OD flow in developing cities. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Causality-Enhanced OD Flow Prediction (CE-OFP), a unified framework that aims to transfer urban knowledge between cities and achieve accuracy improvements in OD flow predictions across data-scarce cities. In specific, we propose a novel reinforcement learning model to discover universal causalities among urban features in data-rich cities and build corresponding causal graphs. Then, we further build Causality-Enhanced Variational Auto-Encoder (CE-VAE) to incorporate causal graphs for effective feature reconstruction in data-scarce cities. Finally, with the reconstructed features, we devise a knowledge distillation method with a graph attention network to migrate the OD prediction model from data-rich cities to data-scare cities. Extensive experiments on two pairs of real-world datasets validate that the proposed CE-OFP remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, which can reduce the RMSE of OD flow prediction for data-scarce cities by up to 11%.
title Causality Enhanced Origin-Destination Flow Prediction in Data-Scarce Cities
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06398