Urban undisciplined events (UUE) are of increasing concern to urban officials because they reduce the quality of life and cause societal disorder. How to accurately predict future occurrences is a key point in preventing these events. However, existing supervised methods struggle to perform well on sparse UUEs while self-supervised MAE-based methods adopt a traditional random masking strategy which leads to limited performance on UUE forecasting. Fortunately, we have designed an innovative spatiotemporal masking strategy and its corresponding pre-training task called Masked Spatio-Temporal Event Series Modeling (MSTEM). Through Cluster-assisted region masking, MSTEM efficiently distributes masked regions evenly among different clusters, enhancing the model's ability to capture spatial correlation and heterogeneity while addressing sparse region distribution of UUEs. Frequency-enhanced patch masking helps the model to sufficiently extract the temporal features of UUEs by reconstructing multiple views. Additionally, we propose future merge and cluster label modeling to enhance the extraction of spatiotemporal dependencies, thereby improving the performance of MSTEM on downstream prediction tasks. Experimental evaluations on four real-world datasets including crimes and disorderly conduct show that our masked autoencoder with MSTEM outperforms most of the state-of-the-art baselines.

Time series forecasting (TSF) consists of point prediction and probabilistic forecasting. Unlike point forecasting which predicts an expected value of a future target, probabilistic time series forecasting models the uncertainty in data by predicting the distribution of future values, which enhances decision-making flexibility and improves risk management. Traditional probabilistic forecasting methods usually assume a fixed distribution of data, which is not always true for time series. Recently, there have been efforts to adapt diffusion models for time series owing to their exceptional ability to model the distribution of data without prior assumptions. However, how to apply advantages of diffusion models to time series forecasting remains a substantial challenge due to specific issues in time series such as distribution drift and complex dynamic temporal patterns.

Urban public nuisance events, like garbage exposure, illegal parking, facilities damage, and etc., impair the quality of life for city residents. Predicting and controlling these nuisances is crucial but complicated due to their ties to subjective and psychological factors. In this study, we reveal a significant correlation between such nuisances and meteorological indicators, influenced by the impact of climate on people's psychological states. We employ meteorology predictions that are integrated in Hawkes processes to enhance the accuracy of predicting the category and timing of these nuisances. To this end, we propose Spatial-Temporal Two-Tower Transformer (ST-T3), which simultaneously considers spatial data and further improves the prediction accuracy. Evaluated by about three-year data from both downtown and suburban Shanghai, our method outperforms both traditional and advanced prediction systems. We share a portion of the de-identified dataset for open research.