Spatial-Temporal Interplay in Human Mobility: A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Approach with Hypergraph Representation

In the realm of human mobility, the decision-making process for selecting the next-visit location is intricately influenced by a trade-off between spatial and temporal constraints, which are reflective of individual needs and preferences. This trade-off, however, varies across individuals, making the modeling of these spatial-temporal dynamics a formidable challenge. To address the problem, in this work, we introduce the "Spatial-temporal Induced Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning" (STI-HRL) framework, for capturing the interplay between spatial and temporal factors in human mobility decision-making. Specifically, STI-HRL employs a two-tiered decision-making process: the low-level focuses on disentangling spatial and temporal preferences using dedicated agents, while the high-level integrates these considerations to finalize the decision. To complement the hierarchical decision setting, we construct a hypergraph to organize historical data, encapsulating the multi-aspect semantics of human mobility. We propose a cross-channel hypergraph embedding module to learn the representations as the states to facilitate the decision-making cycle. Our extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate the superiority of STI-HRL over state-of-the-art methods in predicting users' next visits across various performance metrics.

Streaming Traffic Flow Prediction Based on Continuous Reinforcement Learning

Traffic flow prediction is an important part of smart transportation. The goal is to predict future traffic conditions based on historical data recorded by sensors and the traffic network. As the city continues to build, parts of the transportation network will be added or modified. How to accurately predict expanding and evolving long-term streaming networks is of great significance. To this end, we propose a new simulation-based criterion that considers teaching autonomous agents to mimic sensor patterns, planning their next visit based on the sensor's profile (e.g., traffic, speed, occupancy). The data recorded by the sensor is most accurate when the agent can perfectly simulate the sensor's activity pattern. We propose to formulate the problem as a continuous reinforcement learning task, where the agent is the next flow value predictor, the action is the next time-series flow value in the sensor, and the environment state is a dynamically fused representation of the sensor and transportation network. Actions taken by the agent change the environment, which in turn forces the agent's mode to update, while the agent further explores changes in the dynamic traffic network, which helps the agent predict its next visit more accurately. Therefore, we develop a strategy in which sensors and traffic networks update each other and incorporate temporal context to quantify state representations evolving over time.