STICAP: Spatio-temporal Interactive Attention for Citywide Crowd Activity Prediction

Accurate citywide crowd activity prediction (CAP) can enable proactive crowd mobility management and timely responses to urban events, which has become increasingly important for a myriad of smart city planning and management purposes. However, complex correlations across the crowd activities, spatial and temporal urban environment features and their interactive dependencies, and relevant external factors (e.g., weather conditions) make it highly challenging to predict crowd activities accurately in terms of different venue categories (for instance, venues related to dining, services, and residence) and varying degrees (e.g., daytime and nighttime).

To address the above concerns, we propose STICAP, a citywide spatio-temporal interactive crowd activity prediction approach. In particular, STICAP takes in the location-based social network check-in data (e.g., from Foursquare/Gowalla) as the model inputs and forecasts the crowd activity within each time step for each venue category. Furthermore, we have integrated multiple levels of temporal discretization to interactively capture the relations with historical data. Then, three parallel Residual Spatial Attention Networks (RSAN) in the Spatial Attention Component exploit the hourly, daily, and weekly spatial features of crowd activities, which are further fused and processed by the Temporal Attention Component for interactive CAP. Along with other external factors such as weather conditions and holidays, STICAP adaptively and accurately forecasts the final crowd activities per venue category, enabling potential activity recommendation and other smart city applications. Extensive experimental studies based on three different real-world crowd activity datasets have demonstrated that our proposed STICAP outperforms the baseline and state-of-the-art algorithms in CAP accuracy, with an average error reduction of 35.02%.