Data-Driven Time Series Forecasting for Social Studies Using Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks

Abstract

Time series forecasting with additional spatial information has attracted a tremendous amount of attention in recent research, due to its importance in various real-world applications on social studies, such as conflict prediction and pandemic forecasting. Conventional machine learning methods either consider temporal dependencies only, or treat spatial and temporal relations as two separate autoregressive models, namely, space-time autoregressive models. Such methods suffer when it comes to long-term forecasting or predictions for large-scale areas, due to the high nonlinearity and complexity of spatio-temporal data. In this paper, we propose to address these challenges using spatio-temporal graph neural networks. Empirical results on Violence Early Warning System (ViEWS) dataset and U.S. Covid-19 dataset indicate that our method significantly improved performance over the baseline approaches.