arXiv:2503.06395cs.AI2025-03被引 2

用因果计算框架揭示城市要素间的深层关系,提升交通预测准确性。

Causal Discovery and Inference towards Urban Elements and Associated Factors

  • 基于强化学习构建城市要素因果图,捕捉复杂关系
  • 通过倾向得分匹配消除混杂效应,显著提升预测性能
  • 适合城市规划与智能交通系统研究者参考

为揭示城市的内在运行机制,需深入理解市民、地点与出行行为之间的复杂关系。以往研究多依赖直接相关性分析,但受普遍存在的混杂因素影响,难以准确反映真实因果关系。本文提出一种新型城市因果计算框架,全面探索多种类型城市要素间的关系及混杂效应。设计基于强化学习的算法以发现潜在因果图,刻画城市因子间的因果关联;该因果图进一步用于指导配对因子间因果效应的估计,采用倾向得分匹配法消除混杂影响。在下游城市出行预测任务中,利用因果效应的显著性水平提升模型表现。在开源城市数据集上的实验表明,所发现的因果图呈现层次结构:市民影响地点,二者共同驱动出行行为变化。城市出行预测任务的结果显示,该方法能有效降低混杂效应,并提升城市计算任务性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

To uncover the city's fundamental functioning mechanisms, it is important to acquire a deep understanding of complicated relationships among citizens, location, and mobility behaviors. Previous research studies have applied direct correlation analysis to investigate such relationships. Nevertheless, due to the ubiquitous confounding effects, empirical correlation analysis may not accurately reflect underlying causal relationships among basic urban elements. In this paper, we propose a novel urban causal computing framework to comprehensively explore causalities and confounding effects among a variety of factors across different types of urban elements. In particular, we design a reinforcement learning algorithm to discover the potential causal graph, which depicts the causal relations between urban factors. The causal graph further serves as the guidance for estimating causal effects between pair-wise urban factors by propensity score matching. After removing the confounding effects from correlations, we leverage significance levels of causal effects in downstream urban mobility prediction tasks. Experimental studies on open-source urban datasets show that the discovered causal graph demonstrates a hierarchical structure, where citizens affect locations, and they both cause changes in urban mobility behaviors. Experimental results in urban mobility prediction tasks further show that the proposed method can effectively reduce confounding effects and enhance performance of urban computing tasks.

因果推断城市计算出行预测强化学习

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