Traffic accident forecasting is an important task for intelligent transportation management and emergency response systems. However, this problem is challenging due to the spatial heterogeneity of the environment. Existing data-driven methods mostly focus on studying homogeneous areas with limited size (e.g. a single urban area such as New York City) and fail to handle the heterogeneous accident patterns over space at different scales. Recent advances (e.g. spatial ensemble) utilize pre-defined space partitions and learn multiple models to improve prediction accuracy. However, external knowledge is required to define proper space partitions before training models and pre-defined partitions may not necessarily reduce the heterogeneity. To address this issue, we propose a novel Learning-Integrated Space Partition Framework (LISA) to simultaneously learn partitions while training models, where the partitioning process and learning process are integrated in a way that partitioning is guided explicitly by prediction accuracy rather than other factors. Experiments using real-world datasets, demonstrate that our work can capture underlying heterogeneous patterns in a self-guided way and substantially improve baseline networks by an average of 13.0%.
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