通用地理空间推理的人口动态基础模型
General Geospatial Inference with a Population Dynamics Foundation Model
Mohit Agarwal, Mimi Sun, Chaitanya Kamath, Arbaaz Muslim, Prithul Sarker, Joydeep Paul, Hector Yee, Marcin Sieniek 等 34 位作者
AI 速览：提出人口动态基础模型（PDFM），通过图神经网络融合多源地理数据生成嵌入，在27个地理空间任务上取得领先表现。
Supporting the health and well-being of dynamic populations around the world requires governmental agencies, organizations and researchers to understand and reason over complex relationships between human behavior and local contexts in order to identify high-risk groups and strategically allocate limited resources. Traditional approaches to these classes of problems often entail developing manually curated, task-specific features and models to represent human behavior and the natural and built environment, which can be challenging to adapt to new, or even, related tasks. To address this, we introduce a Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM) that aims to capture the relationships between diverse data modalities and is applicable to a broad range of geospatial tasks. We first construct a geo-indexed dataset for postal codes and counties across the United States, capturing rich aggregated information on human behavior from maps, busyness, and aggregated search trends, and environmental factors such as weather and air quality. We then model this data and the complex relationships between locations using a graph neural network, producing embeddings that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks using relatively simple models. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by benchmarking it on 27 downstream tasks spanning three distinct domains: health indicators, socioeconomic factors, and environmental measurements. The approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 27 geospatial interpolation tasks, and on 25 out of the 27 extrapolation and super-resolution tasks. We combined the PDFM with a state-of-the-art forecasting foundation model, TimesFM, to predict unemployment and poverty, achieving performance that surpasses fully supervised forecasting. The full set of embeddings and sample code are publicly available for researchers.