Towards effective urban region-of-interest demand modeling via graph representation learning

Identifying the region’s functionalities and what the specific Point-of-Interest (POI) needs is essential for effective urban planning. However, due to the diversified and ambiguity nature of urban regions, there are still some significant challenges to be resolved in urban POI demand analysis. To this end, we propose a novel framework, in which Region-of-Interest Demand Modeling is enhanced through the graph representation learning, namely Variational Multi-graph Auto-encoding Fusion, aiming to effectively predict the ROI demand from both the POI level and category level. Specifically, we first divide the urban area into spatially differentiated neighborhood regions, extract the corresponding multi-dimensional natures, and then generate the Spatial-Attributed Region Graph (SARG). After that, we introduce an unsupervised multi-graph based variational auto-encoder to map regional profiles of SARG into latent space, and further retrieve the dynamic latent representations through probabilistic sampling and global fusing. Additionally, during the training process, a spatio-temporal constrained Bayesian algorithm is adopted to infer the destination POIs. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on real-world dataset, which demonstrate our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.