An Attention-Guided Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Network (AG-STCN) for Spatio-Temporal Characterization Analysis

Spatio-temporal characterization analysis plays a key role in spatio-temporal data mining tasks such as social relationship inference, traffic flow prediction, and spatio-temporal graph node classification. Although traditional numerical simulation methods are effective, they often struggle to accurately portray the complex characteristics of spatio-temporal data due to the intricacy of the modeling processes and the limitations of underlying assumptions. Models based on statistical learning and machine learning, such as ARIMA (AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average Model) and SVM (Support Vector Machine), are capable of handling spatio-temporal data to a certain extent, but they are limited in their ability to characterize highly nonlinear data and can fail to effectively capture spatio-temporal correlations. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a new deep learning model, the Attention-Guided Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Network (AG-STCN). In the spatial dimension, the model captures spatial dependencies through an attention-guided soft pruning strategy and graph convolution operations. In the temporal dimension, it employs causal convolutions, gated linear units, and a self-attention mechanism to capture temporal dependencies. Experimental results demonstrate that the AG-STCN significantly outperforms existing baseline methods on real-world datasets for multiple spatio-temporal characterization analysis tasks.