Customer Volume Prediction Using Fusion of Shared-private Dynamic Weighting over Multiple Modalities

Abstract

Customer volume prediction is crucial for a variety of urban applications, such as store location selection. So far, the key challenge lies in how to fuse multiple modalities from different data sources, on account of the massive amount of data accessible, for example, spatio-temporal data and satellite images. In this article, we investigate three dynamic weighting ensemble learning models to fuse spatio-temporal features and visual features for predicting customer volume in the urban commercial district of interest. Specifically, we propose the shared-private dynamic weighting model by incorporating graph neural networks, which is proposed to capture geographic dependencies (i.e., competitiveness or dependencies) between urban commercial districts in an end-to-end manner. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work to utilize graph neural networks to model such geographic relationships. We conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models based on two real datasets. Furthermore, an elaborated visualization method is performed for knowledge discovery.