Bridging the gap between training and inference for spatio-temporal forecasting

Conference Publication ResearchOnline@JCU
Liu, Hongbin;Lee, Ickjai
Abstract

Spatio-temporal sequence forecasting is one of the fundamental tasks in spatio-temporal data mining. It facilitates many real world applications such as precipitation now casting, city wide crowd flow prediction and air pollution forecasting. Recently, a few Seq2Seq based approaches have been proposed, but one of the drawbacks of Seq2Seq models is that, small errors can accumulate quickly along the generated sequence at the inference stage due to the different distributions of training and inference phase. That is because Seq2Seq models minimise single step errors only during training, however the entire sequence has to be generated during the inference phase which generates a discrepancy between training and inference. In this work, we propose a novel curriculum learning based strategy named Temporal Progressive Growing Sampling to effectively bridge the gap between training and inference for spatio-temporal sequence forecasting, by transformin the training process from a fully-supervised manner which utilises all available previous groundtruth values to a less-supervised manner which replaces some of theground-truth context with generated predictions. To do that we sam-ple the target sequence from midway outputs from intermediate models trained with bigger timescales through a carefully designed decaying strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method better models long term dependencies and outperforms baseline approaches on two competitive datasets.

Journal

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Publication Name

ECAI 2020: 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Volume

325

ISBN/ISSN

978-1-64368-101-6

Edition

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Issue

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Pages Count

8

Location

Santiago, Spain

Publisher

IOS Press

Publisher Url

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Publisher Location

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Publish Date

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Url

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Date

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EISSN

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DOI

10.3233/FAIA200234