Geographical entity representation learning (GERL) is the emerging approach that manages and represents geographical entities, which advances a wide range of geographical intelligent applications by mapping entities into a latent vector space. However, previous GERL methods ignore the semantics carried by events that are closely associated with geographical entities, resulting in partially missing semantics in the learned vectors of geographical entities. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an event-enhanced geographical entity representation learning (EGERL) method to incorporate geographical events toward improving GERL. Specifically, EGERL designs an event integration strategy to bridge geographical events and geographical entities. And, it develops an anchor identification algorithm to recognize geographical anchor entities with rich event information. In addition, it augments the connections between anchor entities and non-anchor entities with an enhanced graph to enrich the information dissemination of event semantics. Finally, EGERL derives a relation-aware encoding module to encode geographical entities and their complex relations into vectors. Experimental results show that EGERL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on knowledge representation and graph representation learning, and is robust. The study provides a new exploration of learning entity representations by fusing external semantics, and provides methodological references for various intelligent applications.

Geographical entity representation learning (GERL) aims to embed geographical entities into a low-dimensional vector space, which provides a generalized approach for utilizing geographical entities to serve various geographical intelligence applications. In practice, the spatial distribution of geographical entities is highly unbalanced; thus, it is challenging to embed them accurately. Previous GERL models treated all geographical entities uniformly, resulting in insufficient entity representations. To address this issue, this article proposes an anchor-enhanced GERL (AE-GERL) model, which utilizes the key informative entities as anchors to improve the representations of geographical entities. Specifically, AE-GERL develops an anchor selection algorithm to identify anchors from large-scale geographical entities based on their spatial distribution and entity types. To utilize anchors to guide geographical entities, AE-GERL constructs an anchor-enhanced graph to establish explicit connections between anchors and nonanchor entities. Finally, a graph neural network (GNN) based anchor to nonanchor node learning model is designed to impute missing information of nonanchor entities. Extensive experiments are conducted on four datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that AE-GERL outperforms the baseline models in both sparse and dense scenarios. This study provides a methodological reference for embedding geographical entities in various geographical applications and also provides an effective approach to improve the performance of message-passing-based GNN models.

Urban area data are strategically important for public safety, urban management, and planning. Previous research has attempted to estimate the values of unsampled regular areas, while minimal attention has been paid to the values of irregular areas. To address this problem, this study proposes a hierarchical geospatial graph neural network model based on the spatial hierarchical constraints of areas. The model first characterizes spatial relationships between irregular areas at different spatial scales. Then, it aggregates information from neighboring areas with graph neural networks, and finally, it imputes missing values in fine-grained areas under hierarchical relationship constraints. To investigate the performance of the proposed model, we constructed a new dataset consisting of the urban statistical values of irregular areas in New York City. Experiments on the dataset show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits robustness. The model is adaptable to numerous geographic applications, including traffic management, public safety, and public resource allocation.

Collaborative filtering (CF) is initiated by representing users and items as vectors and seeks to describe the relationship between users and items at a profound level, thus predicting users’ preferred behavior. To address the issue that previous research ignored higher-order geographical interactions hidden in users’ historical behaviors, this paper proposes a location-aware neural graph collaborative filtering model (LA-NGCF), which incorporates location information of items for improving prediction performance. The model characterizes the interactions between items based on spatial decay law from a graph perspective and designs two strategies to capture the interaction effects of users and items considering node heterogeneity. An optimized loss function with spatial distances of items is also developed in the model. Extensive experiments are conducted on three publicly available real-world datasets to examine the effectiveness of our model. Results show that LA-NGCF achieves competitive performances compared with several state-of-the-art models, which suggests that location information of items is beneficial for improving the performance of personalized recommendations. This paper offers an approach to incorporate weighted interactions between items into CF algorithms and enriches the methods of utilizing geographical information for artificial intelligence applications.