When Transfer Learning Meets Cross-City Urban Flow Prediction: Spatio-Temporal Adaptation Matters

Urban flow prediction is a fundamental task to build smart cities, where neural networks have become the most popular method. However, the deep learning methods typically rely on massive training data that are probably inaccessible in real world. In light of this, the community calls for knowledge transfer. However, when adapting transfer learning for cross-city prediction tasks, existing studies are built on static knowledge transfer, ignoring the fact inter-city correlations change dynamically across time. The dynamic correlations make urban feature transfer challenging. This paper proposes a novel Spatio-Temporal Adaptation Network (STAN) to perform urban flow prediction for data-scarce cities via the spatio-temporal knowledge transferred from data-rich cities. STAN encompasses three modules: i) spatial adversarial adaptation module that adopts an adversarial manner to capture the transferable spatial features; ii) temporal attentive adaptation module to attend to critical dynamics for temporal feature transfer; iii) prediction module that aims to learn task-driven transferable knowledge. Extensive experiments on five real datasets show STAN substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods.