<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD JATS (Z39.96) Journal Archiving and Interchange DTD v1.0 20120330//EN" "JATS-archivearticle1.dtd">
<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Graph-based Perspective</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Yameng Guo</string-name>
          <email>yameng.guo@ugent.be</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Seppe vanden Broucke</string-name>
          <email>seppe.vandenbroucke@ugent.be</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="editor">
          <string-name>STRL'23: Second International Workshop on Spatio-Temporal</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Department of Business Informatics and Operations Management, Ghent University</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Tweekerkenstraat 2, 9000 Gent</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="BE">Belgium</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Research Centre for Information Systems Engineering, KU Leuven</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Naamsestaat 69, 3000 Leuven</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="BE">Belgium</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>Workshop Proce dings</institution>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2023</year>
      </pub-date>
      <abstract>
        <p>A wide variety of literature has aimed to integrate the road network into spatial predictive tasks by utilising non-Euclidean distance metrics. Many of these studies have concentrated solely on the length of the path between nodes in a pairwise fashion, which disregards important topological properties and structure of the road network as a whole. Given the increasing popularity of graph-based methodologies such as Graph Neural Networks, this work reflects on the conventional approaches and proposes a graph-based perspective to incorporate road network information in the context of geospatial prediction. Specifically, we propose a unified graph structure that incorporates both target nodes and road nodes and retains both geospatial (location) and topological (structure) information. We then conduct a comparative experiment including statistical models, machine learning techniques, and graph-specific models. The results of our experiment demonstrate that representing road-topology in a graph-based manner extends the range of available techniques in contexts where roads play an important role, i.e. real estate valuation modeling. Our approach is also highly interpretable and can be easily visualized to provide insightful results.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>geospatial modeling</kwd>
        <kwd>graph analytics</kwd>
        <kwd>road network topology</kwd>
        <kwd>real-estate valuation</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>tance of spatial relationships amongst observations in
contexts where observations are associated with a
particular location [1]. When tasked with the construction of a
predictive model for such observations, it is well known
that spatial relationships should be derived in a diferent
That is, the assumption of independent and identically
distributed random variables typically does not apply, as
spatial information comes with dependency structures
that must be taken into account.</p>
      <p>Throughout the past years, we have thus observed a
variety of specialized techniques being applied to
predictive tasks in the geospatial domain, which typically
tween observation or the definition of a kernel function
to define a neighborhood around observations. Many
existing applications do so by expressing the notion of
proximity between observations in Euclidean terms
(“asthe-crow-flies”), based on an idealized Cartesian map.</p>
      <p>Some works have challenged this assumption, and
nEvelop-O
Broucke)
both traditional statistical and machine learning
methrequire the construction of a pairwise distance matrix be- is to add “barriers”: obstacles that influence the shortest
have argued for using non-Euclidean distance [2]. Es- tive task, namely a graph-based representation where
ods, as well as graph-centric approaches can be easily rely on embedding approaches and dimensionality
reapplied. As such, our goal is to convey the following duction techniques such as Isomap to tackle the issue
contributions: of the non-Euclidean distance metric leading to invalid
spatial covariance. Whilst rooted in solid statistical
the• We present a graph-based representation for ory, one drawback of this group of techniques is that
geospatial data which retains both location and ultimately, such approximations do remove some more
road topology information; intricate details resulting from the road network
connect• We conduct a comparative experiment including ing instances. Additionally, relying on pairwise distances
well-known statistical and machine learning tech- between observations does cause that a more global
inniques together with novel graph-based models sight in terms of the road topology (or road network) is
adapted to our representation; lost.
• We show how our representation leads to inter- Other scholars have also focused towards exploring
pretability benefits; a graph-oriented perspective for geospatial prediction.
• An implementation of our work is made publicly Notably in [11], the authors argue towards an
integraavailable1. tion of network information with location information
by directly leveraging the road network as a graph
rep</p>
      <p>The remainder of this work is structured as follows: resentation, which is most closely in line with what is
Section 2 provides an overview of related work. Next, presented herein. Contrary to that work, our focus lies
Section 3 presents our methodology towards construct- more on fine-tuning the manner how the graph is utilized
ing a graph-based representation for geospatial data and to establish predictions rather than eficient query
mechdescribes graph-centric models that can be applied on anisms. Recent work such as [12] has also confirmed the
it. Section 4 then describes the experimental setup to viability of this approach.
compare a number of geospatial models, including the Given the growing popularity of deep learning
techgraph-centric models described previously. Section 5 niques that work directly on graph-based data in recent
discusses the results, and illustrates the interpretability years, an increasing number of researchers are also
exbenefits of our approach. Finally, the paper is concluded ploring potential solutions for house price prediction by
in Section 6. applying related techniques. For example, [13] make use
of geometric learning and apply an attention mechanism
in the context of real estate appraisal. [14] uses a graph
2. Related Work neural network on a graph representation constructed
using point of interest information. Nonetheless, these
apTraditional statistical approaches towards modeling re- proaches sufer once more from a disconnect between the
gression tasks in a geospatial setting are grounded on geospatial and graph perspective: distance-based
methexploring the correlation between geographical instances ods abstract away the road topology and have to rely
using Euclidean distance as a basis [5]. Various interpo- on approximations, whereas graph-based methods have
lation techniques, such as Kriging [6], geographically been mainly centered on incorporating the instances as
weighted regression (GWR) [7], and inverse distance vertices and connecting them—likewise—based on
Euweighting (IDW) [8] have been widely utilized in this clidean or road distance and have seldomly considered
regard. the notion that a direct graph structure follows from</p>
      <p>As was elaborated in the introductory section, it is a given road topology. Notably, this disconnect is also
possible to utilize another distance metric (e.g. to calcu- apparent from an interpretability angle, e.g. when
visulate pairwise distances in the case of Kriging) or kernel alizing results of a given predictive model, where most
function (in the case of geographically weighted regres- displays exhibit e.g. predictions over distinct segments
sion), which in theory allows the user to break away on the road network without being able to provide more
from the Euclidean assumption. For example, [9] investi- granular predictions over, say, a long singular street
seggated this approach by applying a GWR model calibrated ment.
with a non-Euclidean metric that included road network In this work, we take a new look at the graph-oriented
distance and travel time metrics. In [3], similar metrics perspective and propose an adjusted representation
where utilized and combined with a Kriging model. To which shows that both road topology as well as
locasatisfy the underlying assumptions of this method, the tion information can be easily incorporated in a singular
authors present a Minkowski approximation to make view. Based on this representation, we show that novel
the resulting metric well-behaved in terms of symme- graph-centric approaches can be easily applied by means
try and the triangular inequality property. In [10, 4], of a comparative experiment. We also show that our
repsimilar adjustments were proposed, where the authors resentation leads to interpretability benefits by means of
1See: https://github.com/ArmonGo/knnroadgraph naturally-understandable visualization and retaining the
ability to make predictions on a point level rather than
street or street-segment level only.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>3. Geospatial Graph Methodology</title>
      <p>In this section, we describe the two key contributions of
this work. First, we detail our graph-based
representation and how it can be constructed given a set of spatial
observations and a road network. Second, we describe an
adjusted k-Nearest Neighbor approach as a graph-centric
technique that leverages this representation.</p>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>3.1. Representation and Construction</title>
        <p>{ ,  }
A graph is a structure over a set of objects detailing how
pairs of objects are in some sense “related”. The objects
are typically denoted as vertices (or nodes) whereas the
pairs are denoted as edges (or links, arcs). Formally, a
graph is a pair  = ( , )</p>
        <p>with  the vertices and  ⊆
{(  ,   ,  ) ∈ 
2 × ℝ</p>
        <p>0+ ∧   ≠   }, where   ,   ∈  and  is
the weight of the edge. Each element  ∈ 
is defined
as a tuple (,  , , )</p>
        <p>with  and  spatial coordinates,  ∈
indicating the vertex type (road segment
node or node carrying a target value) and  ∈ ℝ
the
target value (i.e. estate price). Only target nodes carry
target values, so ∀(,  , , ) ∈  ∧  =   ∶  = ∅
and target nodes need to be connected to a road node, so

) =   ∧  (

) =  )
with  
∀(  ,   ,  ) ∈  ∶ ¬( (</p>
        <p>a function returning the type of a vertex.</p>
        <p>The end result is a graph structure with two node types,
geospatial coordinates for all nodes, target values for one
node type, and edges inter-connecting road nodes as well
as target nodes to the road structure. This structure is
suficient to present a straightforward view of a graph
and geospatial representation. Note that traditional
tech,
,</p>
        <p>Algorithm 1 Geospatial graph construction from road
lines and target points
Input:  = {( 1,  1,  2,  2)} set of road lines
Input:   ,   ,   vectors of target coordinates and values
Output:  = ( , )</p>
        <p>a graph with road and target nodes
Add road nodes and edges
for ( 1,  1,  2,  2) ∈  do
  ∶= ( 1,  1,  , ∅)
  ∶= ( 2,  2,  , ∅)
 ∶=  ∪ {
 ∶=  ∪ (
 ,   }
 ,   , (
end for</p>
        <sec id="sec-2-1-1">
          <title>Merge road nodes</title>
          <p>for   ∈  do</p>
          <p>,   ))
 ∶= {  ∈  |  ≠   ∧ (
 ,   ) &lt; }
Remove edges from  between   and a   ∈ 
Reconnect edges in  : replace endpoint   ∈  with  
 ∶=  ⧵ 
end for</p>
        </sec>
        <sec id="sec-2-1-2">
          <title>Add target nodes and edges</title>
          <p>for (,  , ) ∈ ((</p>
          <p>,   ) ×   ) do
  ∶= (,  ,  , )
Find closest edge   = (  , 
 ,  ) ∈</p>
          <p>to   with both</p>
          <p>Find closest point (  ,   ) along line of edge   to  
endpoints road nodes
  ∶= (  ,   ,  , ∅)
 ∶=  ∪ {
 ∶=  ∪ {(
 ∶=  ∪ {(
 ∶=  ⧵ { 
}
 ,   }
 ,   , (
 ,   , (
end for
 ,   )), (  ,   , (
 ,   ))}
 ,   ))}
niques can simply utilize the geospatial coordinates and
 = {(
targets the vertices. Also, we define</p>
          <p>to represent the
length of geodesic path between   ,   ∈  , the geodesic
path being the shortest path between two vertices
utilizthe line.
ing the edge weights, e.g. using Dijkstra’s algorithm [15]. lined in Figure 1 and further detailed in Algorithm 1. The</p>
          <p>We now detail the construction of such a graph given
a series of instances with coordinates and associated
target values, e.g. house prices. We also assume access
ifrst step consists of defining the main road topology by
adding in road nodes and edges (</p>
          <p>is returns the
Euclidean distance between two vertices using their spatial
to the road topology or geometry2. Common geospa- location). This is, in practical terms, not directly ready
tial notation describes roads as a set of “LineString”
objects (a sequence of points) or “MultiLineString” objects
(a collection of the former though with no guarantees
on disjointedness amongst the members), i.e. through
for use, i.e. numerical stability inconsistencies as well
as measurement errors typically lead to a graph with
many disconnected edges. Hence, the set of road vertices
are merged based on their spatial location as described
the “Well-Known Text” (WKT) markup language for rep- in [17] ( here is a small threshold value). Next, target
resenting vector geometry objects, a format originally
defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and
now by the ISO/IEC 13249-3:2016 standard [16]. For sake</p>
          <p>2E.g. through OpenStreetMap as is provided in our reference
implementation.
nodes are added in and connected to the road graph. For
the sake of computational eficiency, one could opt here
to add in edges so that each target node is connected to
their closest road node directly. Given the distance-based
edge weights which are used to derive geodesics, it is
of brevity, we do not formalise these objects in detail, but
will assume simply a set of roads segments as a set of
corresponding coordinates for the two points defining</p>
          <p>1,  1,  2,  2)} lines, where ( 1,  1), ( 2,  2) are the</p>
          <p>The construction of the graph representation is
outGiven road segments
and target nodes</p>
          <p>Construct road graph</p>
          <p>Simplify graph:
merge nearby vertices</p>
          <p>Add target nodes
and calculate
closest points
on road graph</p>
          <p>Add connecting edges
more appropriate to connect target nodes based on spa- Table 1
known k-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN) algorithm [18] to con- node positioned at a given location. For instances present</p>
          <p>In general, K-NN works as follows: given a set of train- a new position  , it is likely no matching node can be
ℝ, where  is the target value of  , the feature vec- if the set of nodes to be predicted on during inference
tial closeness to the road network, as we cannot make
strong assumptions in terms of granularity of road
segmentation. Hence, we connect each target node to their
nearest found points on the road network (spatially) by
creating a road node at that nearest location, add in an
edge to the target node, add in two edges from that road
node to the original endpoints of the nearest edge (also
road nodes), and remove the original edge.</p>
        </sec>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>3.2. Models</title>
        <p>To emphasize the eficacy our graph-centric
representation, we present a series of modifications for the well
struct four diferent variations that will be contrasted to
alternative techniques in the next section.
ing instances ( 1,  1), ( 2,  2), … , (  ,   ) each ∈ ℝ
 ×
tor describing instances.</p>
        <p>Given a distance function
(, ) ∶ ℝ  × ℝ</p>
        <p>→ ℝ and a given point  ∈ ℝ  , let
( (1),  (1)), ( (2),  (2)), … , ( () ,  () ) be the reordering of
the training instances so that (
(1),  ) ≤ ⋯ ≤ (
() ,  ) .</p>
        <p>Given a value  ≥ 1 , predictions for new points can be
made as follows:

=1
 (̂ ) ∶ ℝ  → ℝ = ∑  () ×  ()
(1)
where  = ⟨ (1), … ,  () ⟩ a vector weighting the
neighbors. By default,  is uniform so that   = 1 for each  .
Often, the inverse distance is also used, i.e.   =
(a small constant can be added to prevent division by zero;
alternatively, in the presence of zero distances,   = 1 if
( () ,  ) = 0 or 0 otherwise).</p>
        <p>Similar to [11], we will use as a distance function the
length of the geodesic path on the constructed graph, so

∑=1 (

(</p>
        <p>() ,)
() ,)
that
( 1,  1,  2,  2) ∶ ℝ2 × ℝ2 → ℝ =    ( 1, 1),  ( 2, 2)
(2)</p>
        <p>Diferent variations of the proposed K-NN approach
Name
KNN-Power
KNN-PowerDecay
KNN-Softmax
KNN-SoftmaxDecay</p>
        <p>Decay</p>
        <p>Minmax</p>
        <p>Weighting function
7
3
7
3
7
7
3
3</p>
        <p>Power inverse
Power inverse
Softmax
Softmax
with   returning the length of the geodesic path
between two nodes ,  ∈ 
as introduced earlier, the
geodesic path being the shortest path between two
vertices utilizing the edge weights and   (,  ) =
⋃{ ∈
 | ( ) =   ∧ ( ) =  ∧  ( ) =  }
returning the
in the given training set, it is guaranteed by construction
that they can be found in the graph. However, given
found. Two approaches are possible to resolve this. First,
is known, they can be simple added in as target nodes
with their target set blank. They are then to be ignored
during the retrieval of neighbors (as neighbors should
only consist of nodes considered to be in the train set).
This procedure allows that the full graph and distances
can be pre-calculated and is hence more
computationally eficient. In case inference over unknown nodes is
necessary, one has to modify the graph at inference time,
i.e. add  as an target node to the graph, find the closest
connection point, add it as a road node to the graph, add
an edge to connect the node to the graph, add two edges
from the connection point to the original endpoints of
the closest edge, remove the original edge, and then infer
the closest neighbors only using target nodes diferent
from  .</p>
        <p>Next, we introduce the following methods to establish
the weight vector   . First, weights are set equal to the
retrieved distances   = (</p>
        <p>() ,  ) . Naturally, they do not
yet sum to one. First, a decay efect can be optionally
applied as such:
  = 1 − exp(− ∗  
)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(7)
  =</p>
        <p>− ( )
( ) − ( )
  = (
( )</p>
        <p>= exp(
− 

  =

 
∑
=1  

)
)
with  a hyperparameter to adjust the distribution of
neighboring distances. Alternative, a softmax weighting
can be applied:</p>
        <p>with  a hyperparameter to adjust the distribution of
neighboring distances. Finally, the weights are
normalized so that:</p>
        <p>Not all scaling steps are necessary depending on the
weighting function chosen: four variations of the steps
above are viable and are summarized in Table 1.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>4. Experimental Setup</title>
      <p>In this section, we describe an empirical experiment to
compare our presented K-NN based models with other
well-known geospatial predictive modeling techniques,
using a collection of real-life datasets.</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>4.1. Datasets</title>
        <p>Four diferent datasets were collected, encompassing
different regional location and predictive tasks across the
country of Belgium. To retrieve the road network, oficial
and open road data provided by the Flemish geospatial
institute3. Regarding instances, properties where sourced
for the cities of Brussels and Antwerp respectively. An
open Airbnb dataset4 was used to provide a rental-based
regression target (price per property per person per night
per num. bedrooms). We also obtained properties with
a valuation based sale regression target (i.e. house price
per square meters) for both cities from a Belgian real
estate platform.
3See: https://www.vlaanderen.be/datavindplaats/
4See: http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data/
with  the decay amount. Afterwards, minmax scaling
(6) sale-based datasets exhibit an even distribution across
the map, whilst the rental-based data is more
concentrated.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>4.2. Models</title>
        <p>We include the following models in our comparison. First,
GWR [7] and Kriging [6], both traditional geospatial
statistical techniques, using Euclidean distances for both
and GWR fitting an intercept only using an adaptive
kernel. We also include K-means [19], by first clustering
based on the (normalized) geospatial coordinates using
Euclidean distance and then using the average target per
cluster to predict on unseen observations. K-means++
was used as the initialization scheme. A standard CART
regression tree (“Reg. Tree”) [20] as well as Random
Forest [21] was also considered, as well as default K-NN
performed using each node’s spatial coordinates. Target nodes
are colored according to their target value (lighter is more
expensive). Rows: Antwerp, Brussels. Columns: sale, rental
using Euclidean distances with uniform and inverse dis- Table 3
tance weights (“KNN-EuclUni” and “KNN-EuclInv”) [18]. Overview of the hyperparameter grid for the experimental
With our graph representation, we include the four K-NN setup. Non-listed hyperparameters were kept to their default
adaptations presented above as well as another graph- values
based technique, namely Label Propagation [22], a semi- Model
supervised algorithm that assigns labels to unlabeled GWR  × 2]
nodes in a graph by spreading labels from labeled nodes. Kriging
Since Label Propagation does not guarantee proper con- RKe-mg.eTarnese
vergence for regression tasks, we first discretize the target Random Forest
by binning it and using the average price per bin as the KNN-EuclUni
target when predicting on new observations. KNN-EuclInv</p>
        <p>Hyperparameters for all models were systematically KNN-Power
tuned on the validation set using mean absolute error
(MAE) before deciding upon a final model which was KNN-PowerDecay
then evaluated on the unseen test set. Evaluation re- KNN-Softmax
sults are reported using MAE and root mean square
error (RMSE). The full hyperparameter tuning grid is KNN-SoftmaxDecay
provided in Table 3. All experiments were executed
using Python and the scikit-learn, PyKrige, mgwr, and
PyTorch Geometric packages. Label Propagation</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>5. Discussion</title>
      <p>In this section, we present the results of our experiments
and highlight interpretability benefits ofered by our
approach.
avenues for future work which will be discussed in the
concluding section.</p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>5.2. Interpretability</title>
        <p>5.1. Results In many settings, it is important for constructed
predictive models (geospatial or otherwise) to be interpretable.</p>
        <p>The results of the experiments on the four datasets are For instance, geospatial models are often used to make
provided in Table 4. With regards to MAE, we notice decisions that can have significant impacts on the
envithat the graph-centric methods (bottom half in the ta- ronment, public health, and the economy. For geospatial
ble) outperform the traditional geospatial and machine models, an obviously appealing avenue towards getting
learning techniques for three out of four datasets. With insights in predictions ofered by the model is to
visualregards to RMSE, the results are more in favor of tradi- ize the results on a map. Unlike previous visualization
tional techniques though here too we notice that one of methodologies that rely on community segmentation or
the graph-based K-NN techniques obtains the advantage. heatmaps, our approach quite naturally leads to a
vi</p>
        <p>Models leveraging the graph structure hence show sualization where the road network is used in a direct
an interesting alternative compared to those based on manner.
location only with promising results. These findings Given a graph as detailed above and one of the K-NN
highlight the importance of incorporating both location based models, a visualization can be set up by
interpoand topological structure and suggest the potential for lating across each edge and querying the model for its
utilizing graph structures in predictive modeling tasks. prediction for this new point. Note that this potentially
We must, however, highlight the various limitations still leads to a large amount of predictions to be generated,
present. First of all, executing the experiment over more which can be computationally expensive. As such, we
datasets and over repeated train-validation-test splits (e.g. also provide an approximation where predictions are
genby means of a more complete (nested) cross-validation) erated for each road node present in the graph, which is
would allow to make stronger statements by means of then used to interpolate values across each edge.
Visue.g. significance tests. Also, only geospatial coordinates alizations for the four datasets are provided by Figure 3,
were used as regressors. For e.g. house valuation tasks, overlaid on a terrain background. As can be observed,
it is common to set up hedonic pricing models where central areas of both cities display higher prices compared
location information is combined with other attributes to the suburban areas. In Brussels, the South-Eastern part
describing characteristics of the property. Merging this has higher prices (as is known), while in Antwerp, the
with our graph based representation leads to interesting highest prices spread out from the central city along the
river, indicating a discernible trend. Also interesting is
the variation between the rental and sale targets. Streets
located near tourist destinations, universities, and
embassies demonstrate the higher prices in the rental map,
whilst on the sale map, the prices of streets exhibit a
smoother tendency.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>6. Conclusions</title>
      <p>The primary aim of this work was to showcase the
possibility of representing road networks and location-bound
observations as graphs and to examine the potential
usefulness of graph-based techniques in predictive modeling
tasks. A comparative experiment was conducted to
illustrate the predictive and interpretative capabilities of
graph-oriented methods.</p>
      <p>The results provide some initial insights towards
utilizing graph-based representations and techniques which
retain both location information (coordinates) as well
as topological information (road-house network
structure). The limitations should also be acknowledged:
an exhaustive study should consider more datasets and
modeling techniques, stemming from diferent regions
exhibiting difering population densities (our datasets
stemmed from dense urban areas). This, together with a
repeated experiment, would allow to make stronger
statements using statistical hypothesis testing. Moreover, our
setup was limited to comparatively small datasets. When
considering large datasets and graphs, efort should be
spend on the inclusion of eficient graph construction
and neighbor retrieval mechanisms such as outlined
in [23, 24, 25, 26].</p>
      <p>Nevertheless, we do believe that there is strong
potential for future work along this direction. For instance, the
graph structure has not yet been fully exploited: feature
engineering based on e.g. centrality metrics could be an
efective strategy to easily enhance model performance.</p>
      <p>Currently, only geospatial coordinates were used as
regressors. For e.g. house valuation tasks, also attributes
describing characteristics of the property are typically
available. Merging this with our graph based
representation also leads to avenues towards future work, such as
leveraging geometric learning based approaches based
on message passing over graphs.</p>
      <p>ArXiv:2212.12190 [cs].
[14] J. Du, Y. Zhang, P. Wang, J. Leopold, Y. Fu, Beyond
[1] W. R. Tobler, A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Geo-First Law: Learning Spatial Representations
Growth in the Detroit Region, Economic Geogra- via Integrated Autocorrelations and
Complementarphy 46 (1970) 234–240. Publisher: [Clark University, ity, in: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Data
Wiley]. Mining (ICDM), 2019, pp. 160–169. ISSN: 2374-8486.
[2] F. C. Curriero, On the Use of Non-Euclidean Dis- [15] E. W. Dijkstra, A note on two problems in
connextance Measures in Geostatistics, Mathematical Ge- ion with graphs, in: Edsger Wybe Dijkstra: His
ology 38 (2006) 907–926. Life, Work, and Legacy, 2022, pp. 287–290.
[3] H. Crosby, T. Damoulas, A. Caton, P. Davis, [16] J. Melton, A. Eisenberg, Sql multimedia and
appliJ. Porto de Albuquerque, S. A. Jarvis, Road dis- cation packages (sql/mm), ACM Sigmod Record 30
tance and travel time for an improved house price (2001) 97–102.</p>
      <p>Kriging predictor, Geo-spatial Information Science [17] D. H. Douglas, T. K. Peucker, Algorithms for the
21 (2018) 185–194. reduction of the number of points required to
repre[4] H. Crosby, T. Damoulas, S. A. Jarvis, Embedding sent a digitized line or its caricature, Cartographica:
road networks and travel time into distance metrics the international journal for geographic
informafor urban modelling, International Journal of Geo- tion and geovisualization 10 (1973) 112–122.
graphical Information Science 33 (2019) 512–536. [18] T. Cover, P. Hart, Nearest neighbor pattern
classifi[5] S. Basu, T. G. Thibodeau, Analysis of Spatial Au- cation, IEEE transactions on information theory 13
tocorrelation in House Prices, The Journal of Real (1967) 21–27.</p>
      <p>Estate Finance and Economics 17 (1998) 61–85. [19] J. A. Hartigan, M. A. Wong, A k-means
cluster[6] G. Wahba, Spline Models for Observational Data, ing algorithm, JSTOR: Applied Statistics 28 (1979)
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 100–108.</p>
      <p>Philadelphia, 1990. [20] L. Breiman, J. H. Friedman, R. A. Olshen, C. J. Stone,
[7] C. Bitter, G. F. Mulligan, S. Dall’erba, Incorporat- Classification and regression trees, 1984.
ing spatial variation in housing attribute prices: a [21] L. Breiman, Random forests, Machine Learning 45
comparison of geographically weighted regression (2001) 5–32.
and the spatial expansion method, Journal of Geo- [22] Z. Xiaojin, G. Zoubin, Learning from labeled and
ungraphical Systems 9 (2007) 7–27. labeled data with label propagation, in: Tech. Rep.,
[8] University of Salzburg, A Spatial Analysis of House Technical Report CMU-CALD-02–107, Carnegie
Prices in the Kingdom of Fife, Scotland, in: GI_Fo- Mellon University, 2002.
rum 2014 – Geospatial Innovation for Society, Aus- [23] J. Sankaranarayanan, H. Alborzi, H. Samet,
Efitrian Academy of Sciences Press, Salzburg, 2015, pp. cient query processing on spatial networks, in:
125–134. Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international
[9] B. Lu, M. Charlton, P. Harris, A. S. Fotheringham, workshop on Geographic information systems, GIS
Geographically weighted regression with a non- ’05, Association for Computing Machinery, New
Euclidean distance metric: a case study using hedo- York, NY, USA, 2005, pp. 200–209.
nic house price data, International Journal of Geo- [24] C. Shahabi, M. R. Kolahdouzan, M. Sharifzadeh, A
graphical Information Science 28 (2014) 660–681. Road Network Embedding Technique for K-Nearest
[10] H. Zou, Y. Yue, Q. Li, A. G. Yeh, An improved dis- Neighbor Search in Moving Object Databases,
tance metric for the interpolation of link-based traf- GeoInformatica 7 (2003) 255–273.
ifc data using kriging: a case study of a large-scale [25] H. Samet, J. Sankaranarayanan, H. Alborzi,
Scalurban road network, International Journal of Geo- able network distance browsing in spatial databases,
graphical Information Science 26 (2012) 667–689. in: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMOD
inter[11] D. Papadias, J. Zhang, N. Mamoulis, Y. Tao, Query national conference on Management of data,
SIGprocessing in spatial network databases, in: Pro- MOD ’08, Association for Computing Machinery,
ceedings 2003 VLDB Conference, Elsevier, 2003, pp. New York, NY, USA, 2008, pp. 43–54.
802–813. [26] D. Papadias, J. Zhang, N. Mamoulis, Y. Tao, - Query
[12] T. Abeywickrama, M. A. Cheema, D. Taniar, K- Processing in Spatial Network Databases, in:
J.nearest neighbors on road networks: a journey in C. Freytag, P. Lockemann, S. Abiteboul, M. Carey,
experimentation and in-memory implementation, P. Selinger, A. Heuer (Eds.), Proceedings 2003 VLDB
arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.01549 (2016). Conference, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco,
[13] C.-C. Li, W.-Y. Wang, W.-W. Du, W.-C. Peng, 2003, pp. 802–813.</p>
      <p>Look Around! A Neighbor Relation Graph
Learning Framework for Real Estate Appraisal, 2022.</p>
    </sec>
  </body>
  <back>
    <ref-list />
  </back>
</article>