Dirichlet Graph Convolution Coupled Neural Differential Equation for Spatio-temporal Time Series Prediction

In recent years, multivariate time series prediction has attracted extensive research interests. However, the dynamic changes of the spatial topology and the temporal evolution of multivariate variables bring great challenges to the spatio-temporal time series prediction. In this paper, a novel Dirichlet graph convolution module is introduced to automatically learn the spatio-temporal representation, and we combine graph attention (GAT) and neural differential equation (NDE) based on nonlinear state transition to model spatio-temporal state evolution of nonlinear systems. Specifically, the spatial topology is revealed by the cosine similarity of node embeddings. The use of multi-layer Dirichlet graph convolution aims to enhance the representation ability of the model while suppressing the phenomenon of over-smoothing or over-separation. The GCN and LSTM-based network is used as the nonlinear operator to model the evolution law of the dynamic system, and the GAT updates the strength of the connection. In addition, the Euler trapezoidal integral method is used to model the temporal dynamics and makes medium and long-term prediction in latent space from the perspective of nonlinear state transition. The proposed model can adaptively mine spatial correlations and discover spatio-temporal dynamic evolution patterns through the coupled NDE, which makes the modeling process more interpretable. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of spatio-temporal dynamic discovery on predictive performance.