用因果图建模新地点打卡行为,提升预测准确性。
CausalPOI: Spatio-Temporal Graph-Based Causal Modeling for Cold-Start POI Check-in Forecasting

- 构建时空功能交互图,捕捉地点间语义与空间关系。
- 通过处理组与对照组图模拟真实与反事实场景,提升预测精度。
- 适合城市规划与商业决策者用于评估新场所的潜在影响。
随着城市环境快速演变,准确建模兴趣点(POI)的动态行为对支持数据驱动的城市规划和商业决策至关重要。尽管近期时空图学习进展提升了POI预测能力,但多数方法依赖邻近性图和相关性驱动建模,忽略了地点间的功能依赖关系,也未能捕捉城市干预的因果效应。本文提出冷启动POI打卡预测这一新问题,旨在通过建模新引入地点的时间演化及其与周边地点的功能互动,预测其未来的打卡模式。为此,我们提出CausalPOI,一种基于时空图的因果表示学习框架。该框架利用时空功能交互图建模地点间的语义与空间关系,并构建结构对齐的处理组与对照组图,以模拟真实与反事实场景。在真实世界SafeGraph数据集上的大量实验表明,CausalPOI显著优于现有最先进基线,在时空预测、语义互动建模及因果效应估计方面均表现优异,为城市干预分析提供了更可解释、更具行动性的基础。源代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As urban environments continue to evolve rapidly, accurately modeling the dynamic behaviour of Points of Interest is essential for supporting data-driven urban planning and commercial decision-making. While recent advancements in spatio-temporal graph learning have improved POI forecasting, most methods rely on proximity-based graphs and correlation-driven modeling, which overlook the functional dependencies between POIs and fail to capture the causal effects of urban interventions. In this paper, we introduce a novel research problem -- cold-start POI check-in forecasting, which aims to predict the future check-in pattern of a newly introduced POI, by modeling its temporal evolution and functional interactions with nearby POIs in a structured urban spatial context. To address these challenges, we propose CausalPOI, a spatio-temporal graph-based causal representation learning framework. CausalPOI leverages Spatio-Temporal Functional Interaction Graph to model semantic and spatial relationships between POIs, and constructs structurally aligned treatment and control graphs to simulate factual and counterfactual scenarios. Extensive experiments on real-world SafeGraph datasets demonstrate that CausalPOI significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across the board, validating its effectiveness in spatio-temporal forecasting, semantic interaction modeling, and causal effect estimation, providing a more interpretable and actionable foundation for urban intervention analysis. Source code is available at Github.
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