AirDDE: Multifactor Neural Delay Differential Equations for Air Quality ForecastingBinqing Wu, Zongjiang Shang, Shiyu Liu et al.
Accurate air quality forecasting is essential for public health and environmental sustainability, but remains challenging due to the complex pollutant dynamics. Existing deep learning methods often model pollutant dynamics as an instantaneous process, overlooking the intrinsic delays in pollutant propagation. Thus, we propose AirDDE, the first neural delay differential equation framework in this task that integrates delay modeling into a continuous-time pollutant evolution under physical guidance. Specifically, two novel components are introduced: (1) a memory-augmented attention module that retrieves globally and locally historical features, which can adaptively capture delay effects modulated by multifactor data; and (2) a physics-guided delay evolving function, grounded in the diffusion-advection equation, that models diffusion, delayed advection, and source/sink terms, which can capture delay-aware pollutant accumulation patterns with physical plausibility. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that AirDDE achieves the state-of-the-art forecasting performance with an average MAE reduction of 8.79\% over the best baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/w2obin/airdde-aaai.
7.1LGSep 2, 2025
ST-Hyper: Learning High-Order Dependencies Across Multiple Spatial-Temporal Scales for Multivariate Time Series ForecastingBinqing Wu, Jianlong Huang, Zongjiang Shang et al.
In multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting, many deep learning based methods have been proposed for modeling dependencies at multiple spatial (inter-variate) or temporal (intra-variate) scales. However, existing methods may fail to model dependencies across multiple spatial-temporal scales (ST-scales, i.e., scales that jointly consider spatial and temporal scopes). In this work, we propose ST-Hyper to model the high-order dependencies across multiple ST-scales through adaptive hypergraph modeling. Specifically, we introduce a Spatial-Temporal Pyramid Modeling (STPM) module to extract features at multiple ST-scales. Furthermore, we introduce an Adaptive Hypergraph Modeling (AHM) module that learns a sparse hypergraph to capture robust high-order dependencies among features. In addition, we interact with these features through tri-phase hypergraph propagation, which can comprehensively capture multi-scale spatial-temporal dynamics. Experimental results on six real-world MTS datasets demonstrate that ST-Hyper achieves the state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the best baselines with an average MAE reduction of 3.8\% and 6.8\% for long-term and short-term forecasting, respectively.
Group-Aware Graph Neural Network for Nationwide City Air Quality ForecastingLing Chen, Jiahui Xu, Binqing Wu et al.
The problem of air pollution threatens public health. Air quality forecasting can provide the air quality index hours or even days later, which can help the public to prevent air pollution in advance. Previous works focus on citywide air quality forecasting and cannot solve nationwide city forecasting problem, whose difficulties lie in capturing the latent dependencies between geographically distant but highly correlated cities. In this paper, we propose the group-aware graph neural network (GAGNN), a hierarchical model for nationwide city air quality forecasting. The model constructs a city graph and a city group graph to model the spatial and latent dependencies between cities, respectively. GAGNN introduces differentiable grouping network to discover the latent dependencies among cities and generate city groups. Based on the generated city groups, a group correlation encoding module is introduced to learn the correlations between them, which can effectively capture the dependencies between city groups. After the graph construction, GAGNN implements message passing mechanism to model the dependencies between cities and city groups. The evaluation experiments on Chinese city air quality dataset indicate that our GAGNN outperforms existing forecasting models.