TransGlow: Attention-augmented Transduction model based on Graph Neural Networks for Water Flow Forecasting

The hydrometric prediction of water quantity is useful for a variety of applications, including water management, flood forecasting, and flood control. However, the task is difficult due to the dynamic nature and limited data of water systems. Highly interconnected water systems can significantly affect hydrometric forecasting. Consequently, it is crucial to develop models that represent the relationships between other system components. In recent years, numerous hydrological applications have been studied, including streamflow prediction, flood forecasting, and water quality prediction. Existing methods are unable to model the influence of adjacent regions between pairs of variables. In this paper, we propose a spatiotemporal forecasting model that augments the hidden state in Graph Convolution Recurrent Neural Network (GCRN) encoder-decoder using an efficient version of the attention mechanism. The attention layer allows the decoder to access different parts of the input sequence selectively. Since water systems are interconnected and the connectivity information between the stations is implicit, the proposed model leverages a graph learning module to extract a sparse graph adjacency matrix adaptively based on the data. Spatiotemporal forecasting relies on historical data. In some regions, however, historical data may be limited or incomplete, making it difficult to accurately predict future water conditions. Further, we present a new benchmark dataset of water flow from a network of Canadian stations on rivers, streams, and lakes. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model TransGlow significantly outperforms baseline methods by a wide margin.

Simpler is better: Multilevel Abstraction with Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network Cells for Traffic Prediction

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) combined with variants of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have reached state-of-the-art performance in spatiotemporal forecasting tasks. This is particularly the case for traffic forecasting, where GNN models use the graph structure of road networks to account for spatial correlation between links and nodes. Recent solutions are either based on complex graph operations or avoiding predefined graphs. This paper proposes a new sequence-to-sequence architecture to extract the spatiotemporal correlation at multiple levels of abstraction using GNN-RNN cells with sparse architecture to decrease training time compared to more complex designs. Encoding the same input sequence through multiple encoders, with an incremental increase in encoder layers, enables the network to learn general and detailed information through multilevel abstraction. We further present a new benchmark dataset of street-level segment traffic data from Montreal, Canada. Unlike highways, urban road segments are cyclic and characterized by complicated spatial dependencies. Experimental results on the METR-LA benchmark highway and our MSLTD street-level segment datasets demonstrate that our model improves performance by more than 7% for one-hour prediction compared to the baseline methods while reducing computing resource requirements by more than half compared to other competing methods.

Multi-task Recurrent Neural Networks to Simultaneously Infer Mode and Purpose in GPS Trajectories

Multi-task learning is assumed as a powerful inference method, specifically, where there is a considerable correlation between multiple tasks, predicting them in an unique framework may enhance prediction results. This research challenges this assumption by developing several single-task models to compare their results against multi-task learners to infer mode and purpose of trip from smartphone travel survey data collected as part of a smartphone-based travel survey. GPS trajectory data along with socio-demographics and destination-related characteristics are fed into a multi-input neural network framework to predict two outputs; mode and purpose. We deployed Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) that are fed by sequential GPS trajectories. To process the socio-demographics and destination-related characteristics, another neural network, with different embedding and dense layers is used in parallel with RNN layers in a multi-input multi-output framework. The results are compared against the single-task learners that classify mode and purpose independently. We also investigate different RNN approaches such as Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) and Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Units (Bi-GRU). The best multi-task learner was a Bi-GRU model able to classify mode and purpose with an F1-measures of 84.33% and 78.28%, while the best single-task learner to infer mode of transport was a GRU model that achieved an F1-measure of 86.50%, and the best single-task Bi-GRU purpose detection model that reached an F1-measure of 77.38%. While there's an assumption of higher performance of multi-task over sing-task learners, the results of this study does not hold such an assumption and shows, in the context of mode and trip purpose inference from GPS trajectory data, a multi-task learning approach does not bring any considerable advantage over single-task learners.

A Differentially Private Multi-Output Deep Generative Networks Approach For Activity Diary Synthesis

In this work, we develop a privacy-by-design generative model for synthesizing the activity diary of the travel population using state-of-art deep learning approaches. This proposed approach extends literature on population synthesis by contributing novel deep learning to the development and application of synthetic travel data while guaranteeing privacy protection for members of the sample population on which the synthetic populations are based. First, we show a complete de-generalization of activity diaries to simulate the socioeconomic features and longitudinal sequences of geographically and temporally explicit activities. Second, we introduce a differential privacy approach to control the level of resolution disclosing the uniqueness of survey participants. Finally, we experiment using the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We evaluate the statistical distributions, pairwise correlations and measure the level of privacy guaranteed on simulated datasets for varying noise. The results of the model show successes in simulating activity diaries composed of multiple outputs including structured socio-economic features and sequential tour activities in a differentially private manner.

Ensemble Convolutional Neural Networks for Mode Inference in Smartphone Travel Survey

We develop ensemble Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to classify the transportation mode of trip data collected as part of a large-scale smartphone travel survey in Montreal, Canada. Our proposed ensemble library is composed of a series of CNN models with different hyper-parameter values and CNN architectures. In our final model, we combine the output of CNN models using "average voting", "majority voting" and "optimal weights" methods. Furthermore, we exploit the ensemble library by deploying a Random Forest model as a meta-learner. The ensemble method with random forest as meta-learner shows an accuracy of 91.8% which surpasses the other three ensemble combination methods, as well as other comparable models reported in the literature. The "majority voting" and "optimal weights" combination methods result in prediction accuracy rates around 89%, while "average voting" is able to achieve an accuracy of only 85%.

Semi-supervised GANs to Infer Travel Modes in GPS Trajectories

Semi-supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are developed in the context of travel mode inference with uni-dimensional smartphone trajectory data. We use data from a large-scale smartphone travel survey in Montreal, Canada. We convert GPS trajectories into fixed-sized segments with five channels (variables). We develop different GANs architectures and compare their prediction results with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The best semi-supervised GANs model led to a prediction accuracy of 83.4%, while the best CNN model was able to achieve the prediction accuracy of 81.3%. The results compare favorably with previous studies, especially when taking the large-scale real-world nature of the dataset into account.