Indoor temperature prediction is crucial for decision-making in central heating systems. Beyond accuracy, predictions shall be interpretable, i.e. conform to the laws of physics; otherwise, it may lead to system failures or unsafe conditions. However, deep learning models often face criticism regarding interpretability, which limits their application in such settings. To this end, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Consistency enhanced Differential Network (CONST) for interpretable indoor temperature prediction. Our approach mainly consists of a differential predictive module and a spatio-temporal consistency module. Modeling the influential factors, the first module solves the issue of multicollinearity through the differential operation. Considering the heterogeneity of global and local data distributions, the second module characterizes the temporal and spatial consistency to mine the universal pattern by multi-task learning, thereby improving the prediction interpretability. Besides, we propose a set of interpretability metrics to overcome the drawbacks of partial dependence plot metric, which are more practical, zero-centered, flexible, and numerical. We conclude experiments on a real-world dataset with four heating stations. The results demonstrate the advantages of our approach over various baselines, where the interpretability can be improved by more than 8 times on cRPD while maintaining high accuracy. We developed CONST on the SmartHeat system, providing hourly indoor temperature forecasts for 13 heating stations in northern China.

Multi-view unsupervised feature selection (MUFS) has been demonstrated as an effective technique to reduce the dimensionality of multi-view unlabeled data. The existing methods assume that all of views are complete. However, multi-view data are usually incomplete, i.e., a part of instances are presented on some views but not all views. Besides, learning the complete similarity graph, as an important promising technology in existing MUFS methods, cannot achieve due to the missing views. In this paper, we propose a complementary and consensus learning-based incomplete multi-view unsupervised feature selection method (C$^{2}$IMUFS) to address the aforementioned issues. Concretely, C$^{2}$IMUFS integrates feature selection into an extended weighted non-negative matrix factorization model equipped with adaptive learning of view-weights and a sparse$\ell _{2,p}$-norm, which can offer better adaptability and flexibility. By the sparse linear combinations of multiple similarity matrices derived from different views, a complementary learning-guided similarity matrix reconstruction model is presented to obtain the complete similarity graph in each view. Furthermore, C$^{2}$IMUFS learns a consensus clustering indicator matrix across different views and embeds it into a spectral graph term to preserve the local geometric structure. Comprehensive experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of C$^{2}$IMUFS compared with state-of-the-art methods.

As travel efficiency matters to the work productivity of cities, shortening passengers' travel time for metros is therefore a pressing need. To this end, we study a strategy by dynamically scheduling dwell time for trains. Developing such a strategy is challenging because of three aspects: 1) Optimizing the average travel time of passengers needs to properly balance passengers' waiting time at platforms and journey time on trains, as well as considering long-term impacts; 2) Capturing dynamic spatio-temporal (ST) correlations of incoming passengers for metro stations is difficult; and 3) For each train, the dwell time scheduling is affected by other trains, which is hard to measure. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel deep neural network, entitled AutoDwell. Specifically, AutoDwell optimizes the long-term rewards of dwell time settings in terms of passengers' waiting and journey time by a reinforcement learning framework. Next, AutoDwell employs gated recurrent units and graph attention networks to extract the ST correlations of the passenger flows among metro stations. Moreover, attention mechanisms are leveraged in AutoDwell for capturing the interactions between the trains. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of AutoDwell over several baselines, capable of saving passengers' travel time significantly.

Being able to predict the crowd flows in each and every part of a city, especially inirregular regions, is strategically important for traffic control, risk assessment, and public safety. However, it is very challenging because of interactions and spatial correlations between different regions. In addition, it is affected by many factors: i) multipletemporal correlationsamong different time intervals: closeness, period, trend; ii) complexexternalinfluential factors: weather, events; iii)metafeatures: time of the day, day of the week, and so on. In this paper, we formulate crowd flow forecasting in irregular regions as aspatio-temporal graph(STG) prediction problem in which each node represents a region with time-varying flows. By extendinggraph convolutionto handle the spatial information, we propose usingspatial graph convolutionto build amulti-view graph convolutional network(MVGCN) for the crowd flow forecasting problem, where different views can capture different factors as mentioned above. We evaluate MVGCN using four real-world datasets (taxicabs and bikes) and extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms the adaptations of state-of-the-art methods. And we have developed a crowd flow forecasting system for irregular regions that can now be used internally.

The natural gas tightly correlates with our everyday life. However, driven by gray incomes, some users are prone to stealing gas by refitting the equipment without permission. Especially for the boiler room users in winter, this phenomenon appears more rampant. Traditional gas-theft detection methods highly rely on the on-site inspection, where exists ineffective and randomness. With the rapidly deployed IoT sensors, we can collect real-time gas consumption data to analyze users’ behavior patterns, where the gas-theft suspects could be discovered early and accurately. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach, named SVOC, to detect gas-theft suspects among boiler room users. Our approach consists of a scenario-based data quality detection algorithm, a deformation-based normality detection algorithm, and an One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) based anomaly detection algorithm. Specifically, considering the temporal proximity between the gas consumption and the outdoor temperature, the normality detection algorithm adopts a similarity-based deformation correlation to detect normal boiler room users out of abnormal ones. Then, we employ OCSVM as the anomaly detection algorithm to capture various features across multiple data sources, aiming to distinguish gas-theft suspects from the remaining irregular users. Here, the detected normal and abnormal users are fed into the OCSVM for training and prediction, respectively, which can overcome the label scarcity problem. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset during one heating season. The results demonstrate distinct advantages of our approach over various baselines. We have developed a real-time system on the cloud, providing daily gas-theft suspects for gas companies.

Gas theft of restaurants is a major concern in the gas industry, which causes revenue losses for gas companies and endangers the public safety seriously. Traditional methods of gas theft detection highly rely on active human efforts that are extremely ineffective. Thanks to the gas consumption data collected by smart meters, we can devise a data-driven method to tackle this issue. In this paper, we propose a gas-theft detection method msRank to discover suspicious restaurant users when only scarce labels are available. Our method contains three main components: 1)data pre-processing, which filters reading noises and excludes data-missing or zero-use users; 2)normal user modeling, which quantifies the self-stable seasonality of normal users and distinguishes them from unstable ones; and 3)gas-theft suspect detection, which discovers gas-theft suspects among unstable users by RankNet-based suspicion scoring on extracted deviation features. By using detected normal users as negative samples to train RankNet, the component of normal user modeling and that of gas-theft suspect detection are seamlessly connected, overcoming the problem of label scarcity. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate advantages of our approach. We have deployed a system GasShield which provides a gas-theft suspect list weekly for a gas group in northern China.

With the increasing vehicles on the road, it is becoming more and more important to sense citywide traffic, which is of great benefit to the government's policy-making and people's decision making. Currently, traffic speed and volume information are mostly derived from GPS trajectories data and volume sensor records respectively. Unfortunately, speed and volume information suffer from serious data missing problem. Speed can be absent at arbitrary road segment and time slot, while volume is only recorded by limited volume sensors. For modeling citywide traffic, inspired by the observations of missing patterns and prior knowledge about traffic, we propose a neural memorization and generalization approach to infer the missing speed and volume, which mainly consists of a memorization module for speed inference and a generalization module for volume inference. Considering the temporal closeness and period properties, memorization module takes advantage of neural multi-head self-attention architecture to memorize the intrinsic correlations from historical traffic information. Generalization module adopts neural key-value attention architecture to generalize the extrinsic dependencies among volume sensors by exploiting road contexts. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets in two cities, Guiyang and Jinan, and the experimental results consistently demonstrate the advantages of our approach. We have developed a real-time system on the cloud, entitled CityTraffic, providing citywide traffic speed and volume information and fine-grained pollutant emission of vehicles in Guiyang city.

Accompanying the rapid urbanization, many developing countries are suffering from serious air pollution problem. The demand for predicting future air quality is becoming increasingly more important to government's policy-making and people's decision making. In this paper, we predict the air quality of next 48 hours for each monitoring station, considering air quality data, meteorology data, and weather forecast data. Based on the domain knowledge about air pollution, we propose a deep neural network (DNN)-based approach (entitled DeepAir), which consists of a spatial transformation component and a deep distributed fusion network. Considering air pollutants' spatial correlations, the former component converts the spatial sparse air quality data into a consistent input to simulate the pollutant sources. The latter network adopts a neural distributed architecture to fuse heterogeneous urban data for simultaneously capturing the factors affecting air quality, e.g. meteorological conditions. We deployed DeepAir in our AirPollutionPrediction system, providing fine-grained air quality forecasts for 300+ Chinese cities every hour. The experimental results on the data from three-year nine Chinese-city demonstrate the advantages of DeepAir beyond 10 baseline methods. Comparing with the previous online approach in AirPollutionPrediction system, we have 2.4%, 12.2%, 63.2% relative accuracy improvements on short-term, long-term and sudden changes prediction, respectively.

The traffic volume on road segments is a vital property of the transportation efficiency. City-wide traffic volume information can benefit people with their everyday life, and help the government on better city planning. However, there are no existing methods that can monitor the traffic volume of every road, because they are either too expensive or inaccurate. Fortunately, nowadays we can collect a large amount of urban data which provides us the opportunity to tackle this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to infer the city-wide traffic volume information with data collected by loop detectors and taxi trajectories. Although these two data sets are incomplete, sparse and from quite different domains, the proposed spatio-temporal semi-supervised learning model can take the full advantages of both data and accurately infer the volume of each road. In order to provide a better interpretation on the inference results, we also derive the confidence of the inference based on spatio-temporal properties of traffic volume. Real-world data was collected from 155 loop detectors and 6,918 taxis over a period of 17 days in Guiyang China. The experiments performed on this large urban data set demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework on correctly inferring the traffic volume in a city-wide scale.

Traffic volume estimation at the city scale is an important problem useful to many transportation operations and urban applications. This paper proposes a hybrid framework that integrates both state-of-art machine learning techniques and well-established traffic flow theory to estimate citywide traffic volume. In addition to typical urban context features extracted from multiple sources, we extract a special set of features from GPS trajectories based on the implications of traffic flow theory, which provide extra information on the speed-flow relationship. Using the network-wide speed information estimated from a travel speed estimation model, a volume related high level feature is first learned using an unsupervised graphical model. A volume re-interpretation model is then introduced to map the volume related high level feature to the predicted volume using a small amount of ground truth data for training. The framework is evaluated using a GPS trajectory dataset from 33,000 Beijing taxis and volume ground truth data obtained from 4,980 video clips. The results demonstrate effectiveness and potential of the proposed framework in citywide traffic volume estimation.

With advances in location-acquisition techniques, such as GPS- embedded phones, an enormous volume of trajectory data is generated, by people, vehicles, and animals. This trajectory data is one of the most important data sources in many urban computing applications, e.g., traffic modeling, user profiling analysis, air quality inference, and resource allocation.

Advances in location-acquisition and wireless communication technologies have led to wider availability of spatio-temporal (ST) data, which has unique spatial properties (i.e. geographical hierarchy and distance) and temporal properties (i.e. closeness, period and trend). In this paper, we propose a Deep-learning-based prediction model for Spatio-Temporal data (DeepST). We leverage ST domain knowledge to design the architecture of DeepST, which is comprised of two components: spatio-temporal and global. The spatio-temporal component employs the framework of convolutional neural networks to simultaneously model spatial near and distant dependencies, and temporal closeness, period and trend. The global component is used to capture global factors, such as day of the week, weekday or weekend. Using DeepST, we build a real-time crowd flow forecasting system called UrbanFlow1. Experiment results on diverse ST datasets verify DeepST's ability to capture ST data's spatio-temporal properties, showing the advantages of DeepST beyond four baseline methods.

In this paper, we forecast the reading of an air quality monitoring station over the next 48 hours, using a data-driven method that considers current meteorological data, weather forecasts, and air quality data of the station and that of other stations within a few hundred kilometers. Our predictive model is comprised of four major components: 1) a linear regression-based temporal predictor to model the local factors of air quality, 2) a neural network-based spatial predictor to model global factors, 3) a dynamic aggregator combining the predictions of the spatial and temporal predictors according to meteorological data, and 4) an inflection predictor to capture sudden changes in air quality. We evaluate our model with data from 43 cities in China, surpassing the results of multiple baseline methods. We have deployed a system with the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection, providing 48-hour fine-grained air quality forecasts for four major Chinese cities every hour. The forecast function is also enabled on Microsoft Bing Map and MS cloud platform Azure. Our technology is general and can be applied globally for other cities.