Pruning for Generalization: A Transfer-Oriented Spatiotemporal Graph Framework

📅 2026-02-04
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the performance degradation of graph-structured multivariate time series forecasting under data-scarce and cross-domain transfer scenarios by proposing a structure-aware context selection mechanism within a transfer-oriented spatiotemporal graph learning framework. The approach incorporates an explicit graph context pruning strategy as an inductive bias, leveraging information-theoretic measures and correlation-based criteria to select informative subgraphs and features. This selection module is seamlessly integrated into a spatiotemporal convolutional architecture, enhancing both sample efficiency and out-of-distribution generalization. Evaluated under low-data transfer settings on large-scale traffic benchmark datasets, the proposed model significantly outperforms existing baseline methods.

Technology Category

Machine Learning: Graph-based Machine LearningData Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Spatial, Temporal or Spatio-Temporal DataPlanning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Graph neural networks and deep learning approaches for Web-related graphsSemantics and Knowledge: Methods, algorithms and applications for the development of semantic models, knowledge graphs and other forms of structured data models with machine-interpretable semanticsWeb Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data
📝 Abstract
Multivariate time series forecasting in graph-structured domains is critical for real-world applications, yet existing spatiotemporal models often suffer from performance degradation under data scarcity and cross-domain shifts. We address these challenges through the lens of structure-aware context selection. We propose TL-GPSTGN, a transfer-oriented spatiotemporal framework that enhances sample efficiency and out-of-distribution generalization by selectively pruning non-optimized graph context. Specifically, our method employs information-theoretic and correlation-based criteria to extract structurally informative subgraphs and features, resulting in a compact, semantically grounded representation. This optimized context is subsequently integrated into a spatiotemporal convolutional architecture to capture complex multivariate dynamics. Evaluations on large-scale traffic benchmarks demonstrate that TL-GPSTGN consistently outperforms baselines in low-data transfer scenarios. Our findings suggest that explicit context pruning serves as a powerful inductive bias for improving the robustness of graph-based forecasting models.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

multivariate time series forecasting
data scarcity
cross-domain shifts
out-of-distribution generalization
spatiotemporal graph models
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

context pruning
spatiotemporal graph
transfer learning
out-of-distribution generalization
information-theoretic selection
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