On the Integration of Spatial-Temporal Knowledge: A Lightweight Approach to Atmospheric Time Series ForecastingYisong Fu, Fei Wang, Zezhi Shao et al.
Transformers have gained attention in atmospheric time series forecasting (ATSF) for their ability to capture global spatial-temporal correlations. However, their complex architectures lead to excessive parameter counts and extended training times, limiting their scalability to large-scale forecasting. In this paper, we revisit ATSF from a theoretical perspective of atmospheric dynamics and uncover a key insight: spatial-temporal position embedding (STPE) can inherently model spatial-temporal correlations even without attention mechanisms. Its effectiveness arises from the integration of geographical coordinates and temporal features, which are intrinsically linked to atmospheric dynamics. Based on this, we propose STELLA, a Spatial-Temporal knowledge Embedded Lightweight modeL for ASTF, utilizing only STPE and an MLP architecture in place of Transformer layers. With 10k parameters and one hour of training, STELLA achieves superior performance on five datasets compared to other advanced methods. The paper emphasizes the effectiveness of spatial-temporal knowledge integration over complex architectures, providing novel insights for ATSF. The code is available at https://github.com/GestaltCogTeam/STELLA.
4.1LGDec 5, 2025
Sepsis Prediction Using Graph Convolutional Networks over Patient-Feature-Value TripletsBozhi Dan, Di Wu, Ji Xu et al.
In the intensive care setting, sepsis continues to be a major contributor to patient illness and death; however, its timely detection is hindered by the complex, sparse, and heterogeneous nature of electronic health record (EHR) data. We propose Triplet-GCN, a single-branch graph convolutional model that represents each encounter as patient-feature-value triplets, constructs a bipartite EHR graph, and learns patient embeddings via a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) followed by a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP). The pipeline applies type-specific preprocessing -- median imputation and standardization for numeric variables, effect coding for binary features, and mode imputation with low-dimensional embeddings for rare categorical attributes -- and initializes patient nodes with summary statistics, while retaining measurement values on edges to preserve "who measured what and by how much". In a retrospective, multi-center Chinese cohort (N = 648; 70/30 train-test split) drawn from three tertiary hospitals, Triplet-GCN consistently outperforms strong tabular baselines (KNN, SVM, XGBoost, Random Forest) across discrimination and balanced error metrics, yielding a more favorable sensitivity-specificity trade-off and improved overall utility for early warning. These findings indicate that encoding EHR as triplets and propagating information over a patient-feature graph produce more informative patient representations than feature-independent models, offering a simple, end-to-end blueprint for deployable sepsis risk stratification.