Predictive modeling of spatial-temporal data: A graph-centric approach

Spatial-temporal data, from human motion and urban traffic to complex transactional systems, plays a crucial role in modern predictive analytics. Effective modeling of such data is key to capturing intricate spatial and temporal dependencies, enabling accurate forecasting and decision-making across various domains. To this end, graph-based methods have emerged as a powerful approach for representing and modeling such complex relationships.However, current research in spatial-temporal modeling faces significant challenges. Many existing approaches struggle with efficiency and scalability when handling large-scale systems. Additionally, data scarcity and incompleteness often limit model performance and generalizability. In this dissertation, we present various approaches with the goal of obtaining better representations from spatial-temporal data, to address these limitations across different applications. We begin with CoMusion, a framework for stochastic human motion prediction that models motion as a graph, departing from prior latent space approaches and showcasing the benefits of graph-centric modeling for spatial-temporal data. Building on this foundation, we introduce STMAE, a self-supervised learning method using masked autoencoders to enhance various spatial-temporal models for traffic forecasting, mitigating data scarcity and incompleteness concerns. Shifting focus to scalability, we present EiFormer, an efficient architecture employing latent attention to enable large-scale spatial-temporal forecasting in transaction systems, significantly reducing computational complexity. Finally, we apply the graph concept to visual reinforcement learning with MOOSS, which models visual observations and underlying states as graphs, proposing multi-level temporal contrastive learning to improve sample efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed methods over state-of-the-art baselines.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Sun, Jiarui

Contributors dc:contributor

• Chowdhary, Girish
• Schwing, Alexander Gerhard
• Driggs-Campbell, Katherine
• Wang, Yuxiong

• Representation learning
• Spatial-temporal data
• Graph modeling

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Jiarui Sun

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129495

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129495