MGKsite: Multi-Modal Knowledge-Driven Site Selection via Intra and Inter-Modal Graph Fusion

Site selection aims to select optimal locations for new stores, which is crucial in business management and urban computing. The early data-driven models heavily relied on feature engineering, which could not effectively model the complex relationships and diverse influences among different data. To alleviate such issues, the knowledge-driven paradigm is proposed based on urban knowledge graphs (KGs). However, the research on them is at an early stage. They omit extra multi-modal information corresponding to brands and stores due to two main challenges, i.e., (1) building available datasets, and (2) designing effective models. It constrains the expressive ability and practical value of previous models. To this end, we first construct new multi-modal urban KGs for site selection with three extra modal (i.e., visual, textual, and acoustic) attributes. Then, we propose a novel multi-modal knowledge-driven model (MGKsite). Concretely, a graph neural network (GNN) based fusion network is designed to fuse the features based on the attribute K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) graph, which models both intra and inter-modal correlations among the features. The fused embeddings are further injected into the knowledge-driven backbones for learning and inference. Experiments prove promising capacities of MGKsite from five aspects, i.e., superiority, effectiveness, sensitivity, transferability and complexity.