MSTEM: Masked Spatiotemporal Event Series Modeling for Urban Undisciplined Events Forecasting

Urban undisciplined events (UUE) are of increasing concern to urban officials because they reduce the quality of life and cause societal disorder. How to accurately predict future occurrences is a key point in preventing these events. However, existing supervised methods struggle to perform well on sparse UUEs while self-supervised MAE-based methods adopt a traditional random masking strategy which leads to limited performance on UUE forecasting. Fortunately, we have designed an innovative spatiotemporal masking strategy and its corresponding pre-training task called <u>M</u>asked <u>S</u>patio-<u>T</u>emporal <u>E</u>vent Series <u>M</u>odeling (MSTEM). Through Cluster-assisted region masking, MSTEM efficiently distributes masked regions evenly among different clusters, enhancing the model's ability to capture spatial correlation and heterogeneity while addressing sparse region distribution of UUEs. Frequency-enhanced patch masking helps the model to sufficiently extract the temporal features of UUEs by reconstructing multiple views. Additionally, we propose future merge and cluster label modeling to enhance the extraction of spatiotemporal dependencies, thereby improving the performance of MSTEM on downstream prediction tasks. Experimental evaluations on four real-world datasets including crimes and disorderly conduct show that our masked autoencoder with MSTEM outperforms most of the state-of-the-art baselines.