Attention-Based Spatiotemporal Graph Fusion Convolution Networks for Water Quality Prediction

In many fields, spatiotemporal prediction is gaining more and more attention, e.g. , air pollution, weather forecasting, and traffic forecasting. Water quality prediction is a spatiotemporal prediction task. However, there are several challenges in water quality prediction: 1) Water quality time series has a complex nonlinear relationship, making it difficult to predict; 2) Water quality sensors are distributed on the river networks and have a strong spatial dependence on water quality prediction; and 3) Poor long-term forecast accuracy. To solve these problems, this work proposes a spatiotemporal prediction model called a Fusion Spatio-temporal Graph Convolution Neural network (FSGCN). First, This work uses a temporal attention mechanism to solve the nonlinear problem of water quality time series. Second, It adopts a graph convolution to extract spatial dependencies of river networks, and the fusion of spatiotemporal can more easily capture spatiotemporal features. Third, it adopts a temporal convolution residual mechanism, improving long-term series prediction accuracy. This work adopts two real-world datasets to evaluate the proposed FSGCN, and experiments demonstrate that FSGCN outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of prediction accuracy. Note to Practitioners —This work considers the critical problem of spatiotemporal water quality prediction. Accurate water quality prediction can effectively prevent environmental pollution. Traditional water quality prediction only focuses on time series features without considering spatial features. In this work, a novel spatiotemporal prediction approach is proposed that combines spatial-temporal graph fusion construction networks for water quality time series prediction in a real-time manner. This work shows that this approach can achieve longer forecasting sequences and more accurate results than traditional forecasting methods. As a practical consequence of this research, spatiotemporal graph fusion convolution networks for water quality prediction can effectively integrate multi-dimensional data and improve the accuracy of long-term water quality prediction. This approach can also be applied to other fields, including intelligent transportation, smart manufacturing, finance, the Internet of Things, and urban computing.