Spatio-temporal data generation aims to synthesize realistic urban data across graph nodes by learning spatial and temporal dependencies. This task plays a crucial role in urban planning by enabling the simulation of unobserved nodes. However, existing approaches face critical limitations that time series generation methods fail to generalize to unseen nodes, while spatio-temporal generative models are either restricted to the trajectory generation task or dependent on auxiliary data inputs. To bridge these gaps, we propose a Knowledge Graph Guided Heterogeneity-Informed Diffusion Model (KGDiff) in this paper through the following key innovations. First, we design a geometry-aware mixture of experts integrating Euclidean, hyperbolic, and hyperspherical representations to comprehensively encode urban structural knowledge. Next, we present a learnable meta spatio-temporal pattern module that normalizes node-specific heterogeneity before the generation process, and a conditional denoising process that progressively transforms random noise into realistic samples under structural guidance. Finally, extensive experiments across real-world urban datasets demonstrate that KGDiff achieves the state-of-art performance in generating realistic urban spatio-temporal data.

Multimodal traffic flow can reflect the health of the transportation system, and its prediction is crucial to urban traffic management. Recent works overemphasize spatio-temporal correlations of traffic flow, ignoring the physical concepts that lead to the generation of observations and their causal relationship. Spatio-temporal correlations are considered unstable under the influence of different conditions, and spurious correlations may exist in observations. In this paper, we analyze the physical concepts affecting the generation of multimode traffic flow from the perspective of the observation generation principle and propose a Causal Conditional Hidden Markov Model (CCHMM) to predict multimodal traffic flow. In the latent variables inference stage, a posterior network disentangles the causal representations of the concepts of interest from conditional information and observations, and a causal propagation module mines their causal relationship. In the data generation stage, a prior network samples the causal latent variables from the prior distribution and feeds them into the generator to generate multimodal traffic flow. We use a mutually supervised training method for the prior and posterior to enhance the identifiability of the model. Experiments on real-world datasets show that CCHMM can effectively disentangle causal representations of concepts of interest and identify causality, and accurately predict multimodal traffic flow.

As a representative of public transportation, the fundamental issue of managing bike-sharing systems is bike flow prediction. Recent methods overemphasize the spatio-temporal correlations in the data, ignoring the effects of contextual conditions on the transportation system and the inter-regional time-varying causality. In addition, due to the disturbance of incomplete observations in the data, random contextual conditions lead to spurious correlations between data and features, making the prediction of the model ineffective in special scenarios. To overcome this issue, we propose a Spatio-temporal Neural Structure Causal Model(STNSCM) from the perspective of causality. First, we build a causal graph to describe the traffic prediction, and further analyze the causal relationship between the input data, contextual conditions, spatio-temporal states, and prediction results. Second, we propose to apply the frontdoor criterion to eliminate confounding biases in the feature extraction process. Finally, we propose a counterfactual representation reasoning module to extrapolate the spatio-temporal state under the factual scenario to future counterfactual scenarios to improve the prediction performance. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model, especially its resistance to fluctuations caused by the external environment. The source code and data will be released.

Learning, interpreting, and predicting from complex and high-dimensional spatio-temporal data is a natural ability of humans and other intelligent agents, and one of the most important and difficult challenges of AI. Although objects may present different observed phenomena under different situations, their causal mechanism and generation rules are stable and invariant. Different from most existing studies that focus on dynamic correlation, we explore the latent causal structure and mechanism of causal descriptors in the spatio-temporal dimension at the microscopic level, thus revealing the generation principle of observation. In this paper, we regard the causal mechanism as a spatio-temporal causal process modulated by non-stationary exogenous variables. To this end, we propose a theoretically-grounded Generative Causal Interpretation Model (GCIM), which infers explanatory-capable microscopic causal descriptors from observational data via spatio-temporal causal representations. The core of GCIM is to estimate the prior distribution of causal descriptors by using the spatio-temporal causal structure and transition process under the constraints of identifiable conditions, thus extending the Variational Auto Encoder (VAE). Furthermore, our method is able to automatically capture domain information from observations to model non-stationarity. We further analyze the model identifiability, showing that the proposed model learned from observations recovers the true one up to a certain degree. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that GCIM can successfully identify latent causal descriptors and structures, and accurately predict future data.