Universal Transfer Framework for Urban Spatiotemporal Knowledge Based on Radial Basis Function

The accurate and rapid transfer of complex urban spatiotemporal data is crucial for urban computing tasks such as urban planning and public transportation deployment for smart-city applications. Existing works consider auxiliary data or propose end-to-end models to process complex spatiotemporal information into more complex deep features. However, the latter is incapable of decoupling spatiotemporal knowledge, which means these end-to-end models lack modularity and substitutability. A general modular framework that can automatically capture simple representations of complex spatiotemporal information is required. In this article, we thus propose a universal framework for the transfer of spatiotemporal knowledge based on a radial basis function (RBF). We termed this approach spatial–temporal RBF transfer framework (STRBF-TF). The proposed STRBF-TF generates simple RBF representations of spatiotemporal flow distribution with an RBF transfer block and also leverages a channel attention mechanism. Moreover, we propose two RBF kernel initializers suitable for the source and the target domains, respectively. The framework retains important spatiotemporal knowledge in simple representations for the reconfiguration of spatiotemporal feature distribution for fast and accurate transfer. We conducted cross-domain learning experiments on a large real-world telecom dataset. The results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approach, as well as its suitability for real-world applications.