Mechanism-Driven Explainable Urban Spatio-Temporal Prediction

Urban environments generate massive streams of spatio-temporal data, yet accurately predicting urban dynamics remains a fundamental challenge due to complex human mobility patterns, evolving environmental conditions, and distributional shifts across time and space. Mechanism-Driven Explainable Urban Spatio-Temporal Prediction offers a comprehensive and innovative framework that integrates physical mechanisms, causal modeling, and information-theoretic principles into modern deep learning methods, enabling more interpretable, reliable, and generalizable spatio-temporal forecasting.This monograph presents a unified perspective across intrinsic and extrinsic factors that shape urban mobility. It introduces a gravity-inspired potential energy field model to capture intrinsic behavioral mechanisms at both regional and road-network scales, bridging discrete and continuous temporal modeling through differential equation networks. Beyond intrinsic mechanisms, the book proposes a causal basis-vector representation to model spatio-temporal distribution shifts caused by unknown confounders, enhancing robustness under varying scenarios. Furthermore, it develops a theoretically grounded information-theoretic decomposition framework that reduces the complexity of mixed urban data distributions and pushes the predictive performance beyond existing limits.Combining theoretical foundations, methodological innovations, and extensive empirical studies on real-world urban traffic datasets, this book provides a rigorous yet accessible resource for researchers in spatio-temporal modeling, intelligent transportation systems, machine learning, and urban computing. It also serves as a valuable reference for practitioners seeking interpretable and mechanism-aware prediction models for smart city applications.