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We present a framework for spatio-temporal (ST) data modeling, analysis, and forecasting, with a focus on data that is sparse in space and time. Our multi-scaled framework couples two components: a self-exciting point process that models the macroscale statistical behaviors of the ST data and a graph structured recurrent neural network (GSRNN) to discover the microscale patterns of the ST data on the inferred graph. This novel deep neural network (DNN) incorporates the real time interactions of the graph nodes to enable more accurate real time forecasting. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated on both crime and traffic forecasting. 

Accurate real time crime prediction is a fundamental issue for public safety, but remains a challenging problem for the scientific community. Crime occurrences depend on many complex factors. Compared to many predictable events, crime is sparse. At different spatiotemporal scales, crime distributions display dramatically different patterns. These distributions are of very low regularity in both space and time. In this work, we adapt the state-of-the-art deep learning spatio-temporal predictor, ST-ResNet [Zhang et al, AAAI, 2017], to collectively predict crime distribution over the Los Angeles area. Our models are two staged. First, we preprocess the raw crime data. This includes regularization in both space and time to enhance predictable signals. Second, we adapt hierarchical structures of residual convolutional units to train multifactor crime prediction models. Experiments over a half year period in Los Angeles reveal highly accurate predictive power of our models.