The real world naturally has dimensions of time and space. Therefore, estimating the counterfactual outcomes with spatial-temporal attributes is a crucial problem. However, previous methods are based on classical statistical models, which still have limitations in performance and generalization. This paper proposes a novel framework for estimating counterfactual outcomes with spatial-temporal attributes using the Transformer, exhibiting stronger estimation ability. Under mild assumptions, the proposed estimator within this framework is consistent and asymptotically normal. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct simulation experiments and real data experiments. Simulation experiments show that our estimator has a stronger estimation capability than baseline methods. Real data experiments provide a valuable conclusion to the causal effect of conflicts on forest loss in Colombia. The source code is available at https://github.com/lihe-maxsize/DeppSTCI_Release_Version-master.

Understanding and predicting urban dynamics is crucial for managing transportation systems, optimizing urban planning, and enhancing public services. While neural network-based approaches have achieved success, they often rely on task-specific architectures and large volumes of data, limiting their ability to generalize across diverse urban scenarios. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning and generalization capabilities, yet their application to spatial-temporal urban dynamics remains underexplored. Existing LLM-based methods struggle to effectively integrate multifaceted spatial-temporal data and fail to address distributional shifts between training and testing data, limiting their predictive reliability in real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we propose UrbanMind, a novel spatial-temporal LLM framework for multifaceted urban dynamics prediction that ensures both accurate forecasting and robust generalization. At its core, UrbanMind introduces Muffin-MAE, a multifaceted fusion masked autoencoder with specialized masking strategies that capture intricate spatial-temporal dependencies and intercorrelations among multifaceted urban dynamics. Additionally, we design a semantic-aware prompting and fine-tuning strategy that encodes spatial-temporal contextual details into prompts, enhancing LLMs' ability to reason over spatial-temporal patterns. To further improve generalization, we introduce a test time adaptation mechanism with a test data reconstructor, enabling UrbanMind to dynamically adjust to unseen test data by reconstructing LLM-generated embeddings. Extensive experiments on real-world urban datasets across multiple cities demonstrate that UrbanMind consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving high accuracy and robust generalization, even in zero-shot settings.

Spatial-temporal forecasting and imputation are important for real-world dynamic systems such as intelligent transportation, urban planning, and public health. Most existing methods are tailored for individual forecasting or imputation tasks but are not designed for both. Additionally, they are less effective for zero-shot and few-shot learning. While large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong pattern recognition and reasoning abilities across various tasks, including few-shot and zero-shot learning, their development in understanding spatial-temporal data has been constrained by insufficient modeling of complex correlations such as the temporal correlations, spatial connectivity, non-pairwise and high-order spatial-temporal correlations within data. In this paper, we propose STD-LLM for understanding both spatial and temporal properties of \underline{S}patial-\underline{T}emporal \underline{D}ata with \underline{LLM}s, which is capable of implementing both spatial-temporal forecasting and imputation tasks. STD-LLM understands spatial-temporal correlations via explicitly designed spatial and temporal tokenizers as well as virtual nodes. Topology-aware node embeddings are designed for LLMs to comprehend and exploit the topology structure of data. Additionally, to capture the non-pairwise and higher-order correlations, we design a hypergraph learning module for LLMs, which can enhance the overall performance and improve efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STD-LLM exhibits strong performance and generalization capabilities across the forecasting and imputation tasks on various datasets. Moreover, STD-LLM achieves promising results on both few-shot and zero-shot learning tasks.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate tasks like natural language processing and computer vision, harnessing their power for spatial-temporal forecasting remains challenging. The disparity between sequential text and complex spatial-temporal data hinders this application. To address this issue, this paper introduces STG-LLM, an innovative approach empowering LLMs for spatial-temporal forecasting. We tackle the data mismatch by proposing: 1) STG-Tokenizer: This spatial-temporal graph tokenizer transforms intricate graph data into concise tokens capturing both spatial and temporal relationships; 2) STG-Adapter: This minimalistic adapter, consisting of linear encoding and decoding layers, bridges the gap between tokenized data and LLM comprehension. By fine-tuning only a small set of parameters, it can effectively grasp the semantics of tokens generated by STG-Tokenizer, while preserving the original natural language understanding capabilities of LLMs. Extensive experiments on diverse spatial-temporal benchmark datasets show that STG-LLM successfully unlocks LLM potential for spatial-temporal forecasting. Remarkably, our approach achieves competitive performance on par with dedicated SOTA methods.

The field of urban spatial-temporal prediction is advancing rapidly with the development of deep learning techniques and the availability of large-scale datasets. However, challenges persist in accessing and utilizing diverse urban spatial-temporal datasets from different sources and stored in different formats, as well as determining effective model structures and components with the proliferation of deep learning models. This work addresses these challenges and provides three significant contributions. Firstly, we introduce "atomic files", a unified storage format designed for urban spatial-temporal big data, and validate its effectiveness on 40 diverse datasets, simplifying data management. Secondly, we present a comprehensive overview of technological advances in urban spatial-temporal prediction models, guiding the development of robust models. Thirdly, we conduct extensive experiments using diverse models and datasets, establishing a performance leaderboard and identifying promising research directions. Overall, this work effectively manages urban spatial-temporal data, guides future efforts, and facilitates the development of accurate and efficient urban spatial-temporal prediction models. It can potentially make long-term contributions to urban spatial-temporal data management and prediction, ultimately leading to improved urban living standards.

As deep learning technology advances and more urban spatial-temporal data accumulates, an increasing number of deep learning models are being proposed to solve urban spatial-temporal prediction problems. However, there are limitations in the existing field, including open-source data being in various formats and difficult to use, few papers making their code and data openly available, and open-source models often using different frameworks and platforms, making comparisons challenging. A standardized framework is urgently needed to implement and evaluate these methods. To address these issues, we propose LibCity, an open-source library that offers researchers a credible experimental tool and a convenient development framework. In this library, we have reproduced 65 spatial-temporal prediction models and collected 55 spatial-temporal datasets, allowing researchers to conduct comprehensive experiments conveniently. By enabling fair model comparisons, designing a unified data storage format, and simplifying the process of developing new models, LibCity is poised to make significant contributions to the spatial-temporal prediction field.

Spatial-temporal data contains rich information and has been widely studied in recent years due to the rapid development of relevant applications in many fields. For instance, medical institutions often use electrodes attached to different parts of a patient to analyse the electorencephal data rich with spatial and temporal features for health assessment and disease diagnosis. Existing research has mainly used deep learning techniques such as convolutional neural network (CNN) or recurrent neural network (RNN) to extract hidden spatial-temporal features. Yet, it is challenging to incorporate both inter-dependencies spatial information and dynamic temporal changes simultaneously. In reality, for a model that leverages these spatial-temporal features to fulfil complex prediction tasks, it often requires a colossal amount of training data in order to obtain satisfactory model performance. Considering the above-mentioned challenges, we propose an adaptive federated relevance framework, namely FedRel, for spatial-temporal graph learning in this paper. After transforming the raw spatial-temporal data into high quality features, the core Dynamic Inter-Intra Graph (DIIG) module in the framework is able to use these features to generate the spatial-temporal graphs capable of capturing the hidden topological and long-term temporal correlation information in these graphs. To improve the model generalization ability and performance while preserving the local data privacy, we also design a relevance-driven federated learning module in our framework to leverage diverse data distributions from different participants with attentive aggregations of their models.

Spatial-temporal data modeling aims to mine the underlying spatial relationships and temporal dependencies of objects in a system. However, most existing methods focus on the modeling of spatial-temporal data in a single mode, lacking the understanding of multiple modes. Though very few methods have been presented to learn the multi-mode relationships recently, they are built on complicated components with higher model complexities. In this paper, we propose a simple framework for multi-mode spatial-temporal data modeling to bring both effectiveness and efficiency together. Specifically, we design a general cross-mode spatial relationships learning component to adaptively establish connections between multiple modes and propagate information along the learned connections. Moreover, we employ multi-layer perceptrons to capture the temporal dependencies and channel correlations, which are conceptually and technically succinct. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our model can consistently outperform the baselines with lower space and time complexity, opening up a promising direction for modeling spatial-temporal data. The generalizability of the cross-mode spatial relationships learning module is also validated.

Therefore, it is of great significance to design such an end-to-end FL-GNN training framework. Graph Neural Network (GNN) has emerged recently owing to its ability to learn vector representations from complex In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end spatialtemporal graph data. The GNN has now been widely used in applications federated learning framework for graph neural networks such as social network recommendation (Wu et al. (STFL), which can automatically transform time series 2021; He et al. 2019), traffic flow prediction (Wang et al. data into graph-structured data, and train GNNs collectively 2020; Cui et al. 2019), action recognition (Yan, Xiong, and to ensure good data privacy and model generalization. Lin 2018) and medical diagnosis (Rong et al. 2020; Sun We break our contributions into the following parts: et al. 2020). In addition to only using GNN models on learning 1. we first implement the graph generator to handle spatialtemporal the graph representations from different graph data, one data, including both feature extraction and node critical question is how to generalize the GNN models even correlation exploration; 2. we integrate the graph generator when the training data is insufficient, regardless of the graph into the proposed STFL and design an end-to-end federated or non-graph structures. This scenario applies to almost all learning framework for spatial-temporal GNNs on graphlevel cases where the data privacy is the major concern, and the classification tasks; 3. we perform extensive experiments model can only be trained to match the distribution of the on real-world sleeping dataset: ISRUC S3; 4. we publish local dataset.

Urban spatial-temporal flows prediction is of great importance to traffic management, land use, public safety, etc. Urban flows are affected by several complex and dynamic factors, such as patterns of human activities, weather, events and holidays. Datasets evaluated the flows come from various sources in different domains, e.g. mobile phone data, taxi trajectories data, metro/bus swiping data, bike-sharing data and so on. To summarize these methodologies of urban flows prediction, in this paper, we first introduce four main factors affecting urban flows. Second, in order to further analysis urban flows, a preparation process of multi-sources spatial-temporal data related with urban flows is partitioned into three groups. Third, we choose the spatial-temporal dynamic data as a case study for the urban flows prediction task. Fourth, we analyze and compare some well-known and state-of-the-art flows prediction methods in detail, classifying them into five categories: statistics-based, traditional machine learning-based, deep learning-based, reinforcement learning-based and transfer learning-based methods. Finally, we give open challenges of urban flows prediction and an outlook in the future of this field. This paper will facilitate researchers find suitable methods and open datasets for addressing urban spatial-temporal flows forecast problems.