Time-Frequency Disentanglement Boosted Pre-Training: A Universal Spatio-Temporal Modeling Framework

Abstract

Current spatio-temporal modeling techniques largely rely on the abundant data and the design of task-specific models. However, many cities lack well-established digital infrastructures, making data scarcity and the high cost of model development significant barriers to application deployment. Therefore, this work aims to enable spatio-temporal learning to cope with the problems of few-shot data modeling and model generalizability. To this end, we propose a Universal Spatio-Temporal Correlationship pre-training framework (USTC), for spatio-temporal modeling across different cities and tasks. To enhance the spatio-temporal representations during pre-training, we propose to decouple the time-frequency patterns within data, and leverage contrastive learning to maintain the time-frequency consistency. To further improve the adaptability to downstream tasks, we design a prompt generation module to mine personalized spatio-temporal patterns on the target city, which can be integrated with the learned common spatio-temporal representations to collaboratively serve downstream tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that USTC significantly outperforms the advanced baselines in forecasting, imputation, and extrapolation across cities.