Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301

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Journal of Air Transport Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jairtraman

Temporal attention aware dual-graph convolution network for air traffic

flow prediction
Kaiquan Cai a, Zhiqi Shen a, Xiaoyan Luo b, *, Yue Li a
a
School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China
b
School of Astronautics, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Air traffic flow prediction is vital for its supporting function for collaborative decision making in Air Traffic
Air traffic flow prediction Management. However, due to the inherent spatial and temporal dependencies of air traffic flow and the
Spatial and temporal dependencies irregular sector structure in which flow operates in, it is still a challenging problem. To solve this problem,
Dual-graph convolution
numerous methods are proposed considering airspace adjacency, while flight routes and the origin-destination
Long path dependencies
Temporal attention
dependency are not taken into account. In this paper, we propose a temporal attention aware dual-graph
convolution network (TAaDGCN) to predict air traffic flow, in which the airspace structure and routes of flow
are both included. Firstly, a complementary spatial dual graph convolution module is constructed to capture the
dependencies of adjacent sectors and origin-destination (OD) sectors. Then, to include long path information, a
spatial embedding (SE) block is adopted to represent potential related sectors of flight traversal. Furthermore, to
characterize temporal evolution pattern, a temporal attention (TA) module is applied to access past features of
input sequence. Based on the blocks stated above, a spatio-temporal block is constructed in which multiple
spatial and temporal dependencies are covered. The experimental results on real-world flight data demonstrate
the proposed method can achieve a better prediction performance than other state-of-the-art comparison
methods, especially superior to the methods that ignore the sector spatial structure.

1. Introduction
With the rapid economic development, the demand for air traffic in
many fields has greatly increased (Kuhn, 2016; Wang and Cai et al.,
2020). However, there is a growing conflict between the rapid growth of
air traffic demand and the limited capacity of the air traffic management
(ATM) system, which further contributes to airspace congestion and
flight delays. (Li et al., 2008; Montlaur and Delgado, 2017; Chen et al,
2019; Yang and Mao et al., 2018; Cai and Zhang et al., 2017). These
problems give rise to higher requirements for air traffic flow manage­
ment (ATFM) (Zhang and Hao et al., 2015; Rocha et al., 2018). Efficient
air traffic management decisions are dependent on accurate air traffic
flow prediction. Air traffic flow prediction (ATFP), as the core technol­
ogy of ATFM, can provide decision-making basis to formulate effective
management strategies, which has received increasing worldwide
attention (Xu and Prats et al., 2020). Accurate ATFP enables air traffic
controllers to be aware of the trend of air traffic flow, which is signifi­
cant to flight safety assurance (Sandamali and Su et al., 2020).
Air traffic flow prediction can be divided into four levels from the
perspective of the prediction area: sector, route, route points and airport
(Murça and Hansman, 2018). Since air traffic controllers manage flight
in units of sectors, we mainly focus on the flow of sectors in this paper. In
the recent years, massive efforts have been made to solve the problem
(Cao and Zhang, 2013; Sridhar and Soni et al., 2006; Bayen and Grieder
et al., 2002). Related ATFP studies can be roughly divided into two
categories: the model-driven approach and the data-driven approach (Li
and Zhang et al., 2016; Tian and Zhang et al., 2016; Xu and Yin et al.,
2015). The model-driven approach formulates traffic problems by con­
structing a model, which requires complex system programming and
high computational complexity, especially when the number of aircrafts
has increased significantly (Bayen and Grieder et al., 2002; Lin and
Zhang et al., 2018). The data-driven approach mainly include time series
algorithms and machine learning algorithms. The time series algorithms
regard air traffic flow as a time series, which predict future flow by
mining the potential evolution laws in history series. (Vardaro and Doan
et al., 2013; Cadenas; Rivera et al., 2016; Mehrmolaei and Keyvanpour,
2016). With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, numerous
researchers have turned their attention to the machine learning

* Corresponding author. XueYuan Road No.37, HaiDian District, BeiJing, China.

E-mail address: luoxy@buaa.edu.cn (X. Luo).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2022.102301
Received 24 February 2022; Received in revised form 7 August 2022; Accepted 7 September 2022
Available online 26 September 2022
0969-6997/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
K. Cai et al.
methods, such as support vector machines (SVM) and shallow neural
networks (Qiu and Li, 2014; Zhang and Jiang et al., 2016; Wang and
Liang et al., 2018). However, these methods neglect the complex actual
environment in air traffic, which can not capture spatial correlation of
different regions, resulting in an unsatisfactory performance. Consid­
ering the air traffic flow of different regions is closely related, some
researchers attempt to encode the air traffic flow into a traffic flow
matrix (TFM), and model the spatial and temporal dependencies by
convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory
(LSTM) (Lin and Zhang et al., 2019; Liu and Lin et al., 2019). Although
spatial dependencies are considered in these methods by modelling air
traffic as a grid matrix, it is not suitable for flow prediction of airspace
sectors which have irregular topology. In addition, there are still
shortcomings in modelling the long-term temporal dependencies.
In summary, the ATFP performance in existing researches is still far
from satisfactory, mainly due to the following challenges:
(i) It is difficult to efficiently model the irregular sector structure and
fully capture the complex spatial dependencies. Firstly, it should
be noted that the air traffic flow distribution of any sector has
significant dependencies with its neighboring sectors. Secondly,
the traffic flow between long-distance sectors will also affect each
other due to the fixed routes. For example, there are many
scheduled flights between Beijing and Shanghai. Although they
are far away, there is still a great spatial dependency between
them. Finally, aircraft trajectories have fixed routes, resulting in a
dependency relationship on the sectors crossed by a certain path,
which is called long path dependency in this paper.
(ii) It is difficult to accurately capture the temporal dependencies
between the historical flow and the future flow. Historical traffic
patterns may affect the current traffic flow, which reveals the
temporal dependencies of air traffic flow. However, long-term
information is difficult to be accurately captured since most
existing models can not directly access past features in long input
sequences, which implies a limitation in capturing long temporal
dependencies.
Based on these above observations, we propose a temporal attention
aware dual-graph convolution network (TAaDGCN) to predict air traffic
flow across airspace sectors, which can capture the spatial dimension
dependencies and the temporal dimension dependencies. To efficiently
model the irregular structures of airspace sectors, a dual-graph module
is specifically designed for the characteristics of air traffic flow, i.e., the
adjacency graph and the origin-destination (OD) graph. Since air traffic
network has irregular topologies which can be well modelled by graph
convolutional networks, but how to construct the graph is an open
problem. Existing strategies of constructing graphs are not suitable for
flight data. Therefore, we construct a dual-graph structure combining
the characteristics of air traffic and integrate it into the graph convo­
lution, which is called dual-graph strategy including adjacency graph
and origin-destination (OD) pair graph. To characterize the evolution of
temporal information, we employ a temporal attention (TA) module. In
addition, to combine the characteristics of long paths in air traffic, TA
module is implemented after concatenating the input history flow and
the spatial embedding (SE) based on path. Specifically, the proposed
spatial embedding (SE) block encodes sector nodes as vectors that pre­
serve the long path information. To take multiple spatial and temporal
dependencies into account, a spatio-temporal block (ST block) based on
the dual-graph module and the attention module is designed, in which
two complementary graphs are incorporated into the graph convolution
to capture complex spatial dependencies, and an attention mechanism is
adopted to efficiently capture complex temporal dependencies. Overall,
our model follows the encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder
encodes the input traffic features and the decoder predicts the output
sequence. Between the encoder and the decoder, there is a transform
layer, which is used to transform the time dimension of the hidden
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Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301
features. By stacking the ST blocks in the encoder-decoder architecture,
multiple spatial and temporal dependencies can be effectively modelled.
2. Related works
In recent years, traffic flow prediction has attracted widespread
attention from researchers all over the world. The existing methods can
be roughly divided into two categories: the model-driven approach and
the data-driven approach. These methods are described in detail below.
Firstly, the model-driven approach is a formulaic representation of
the traffic flow evolution law by constructing a model, and such ap­
proaches require comprehensive and detailed systematic modelling
based on prior knowledge. The representative algorithms contain the
flight plan-based algorithms and the uncertainty analysis algorithms.
The flight plan-based algorithms are traditional air traffic flow predic­
tion approaches, which mainly use some rule-based knowledge in the
aviation system to infer the future air traffic flow (Lin and Zhang et al.
2018). For example, Chen et al. (2013) utilize the real-time flight plan
data in the EuroCat-X system to make air traffic forecasts on positioning
points, airports, routes, sectors, etc. The model makes good use of the
powerful computing abilities and abundant information resources of
Eurocat-X system, and gets latest information of aircrafts’movement
directly from air traffic management, so that the real-time performance
can be improved. The uncertainty analysis algorithms focus on the un­
certainty in the flow evolution process, and model uncertain factors to
predict flight flow (Tian and Zhang et al., 2016; Steiner and Krozel et al.,
2009; Xu and Yin et al., 2015). Zerrouki and Bouchon et al. (1999)
propose a modified interaction prediction method using a fuzzy model
for predicting air traffic flow, and fuzzy constraint is applied to describe
some uncertain information in air traffic system, which builds an air
traffic flow prediction model based on the fuzzy constraint. Meyn (2002)
establish a simple and efficient probabilistic method for air traffic de­
mand forecast. The method analyzes the uncertain factors affecting air
traffic and models how aircraft interact using the uncertainties, which
provides better flow estimates. The flight plan-based algorithms and the
uncertainty analysis algorithms explicitly model flow variation patterns.
However, in reality, traffic flow data is affected by many factors, which
makes it difficult to obtain accurate traffic prediction models. The
existing models can not accurately describe the changes of traffic flow in
complex realistic environments and the construction of these models
requires high computational complexity.
Secondly, the data-driven approaches infer trends based on statisti­
cal patterns in the data, which are ultimately used to predict and assess
the traffic conditions. Such methods do not analyze the physical char­
acteristics and dynamic behavior of the traffic system, so that they are
highly flexible. Early data-driven methods include time series algo­
rithms, which regard the historical air traffic flow as a time series and fit
the observed time series into a parametric model to predict future traffic
flow. Since the flight flow of sectors for a certain period is affected by the
flight flow of the first several hours, it could utilize the flow data of the
first few hours to predict the flow of the subsequent period. As early as
1976, the autoregressive integrate moving average model (ARIMA) is
proposed and become the most widely used time series model, which is a
regression method using its own historical data (Vardaro and Doan
et al., 2013; Cadenas Rivera et al., 2016; Mehrmolaei and Keyvanpour,
2016). To improve the prediction precision, different variants are pro­
duced, including subset ARIMA (Lee and Fambro, 1999), seasonal
ARIMA (Fabian et al., 2003), and so on, which further improves the
prediction performance. With the development of artificial intelligence,
machine learning methods have become representative of data-driven
methods. More researchers are trying to use machine learning models
to predict air traffic flow. These methods use smarter statistical models,
which can make computer systems to find more complex patterns in
large amounts of data. The machine learning algorithms as typical
data-driven approaches, include support vector machines (SVM) and
shallow neural networks (Wang and Liang et al., 2018). For example,
K. Cai et al.
Fig. 1. (a) The spatio-temporal structure of air traffic flow, where the sector structure and flow at each time slice forms a graph. (b) The flow vector generated by
each node on the sector network.
Zhang and Jiang et al. (2016) use support vector machines to predict air
traffic flow, which improves the real-time monitoring and controlling in
terminal areas. Qiu and Li (2014) propose a prediction method based on
the wavelet neural network, which uses nonlinear wavelet to replace the
nonlinear activation function in the conventional neural network. The
development of these methods demonstrates that machine learning is a
powerful tool in ATFP.
However, none of the above methods considers spatial correlation.
To capture spatial correlation of the air traffic flow, some end-to-end
deep learning models are proposed, which encode the air traffic flow
into a traffic flow matrix (TFM), and then extract spatial and temporal
dependencies by CNN and LSTM (Lin and Zhang et al., 2019; Liu and Lin
et al., 2019). However, there are still limitations in these ATFP methods.
Air traffic controllers manage air traffic flow in units of sectors, so
modelling air traffic as a grid matrix is not suitable for flow prediction of
airspace sectors which have irregular topology.
In contrast, in road traffic flow prediction, many researchers have
made great efforts to solve the above problems. For the spatial de­
pendencies, recent researches show the effectiveness of graph convolu­
tion network (GCN) in irregular data embedding (Kipf and Welling et al.,
2016; Yao and Tian and Zhang, 2016; Cai et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2021).
GCN generalizes CNN to irregular data forms, which can be mainly
divided into two categories according to different convolution opera­
tors. One is to rearrange the vertices into the grid forms and process
them by normal convolution operations (Niepert et al., 2016), the other
is to use the graph Fourier transform to convert vertices into the spectral
domain (Bruna et al., 2013; Defferrard et al., 2016; Kipf and Welling
et al., 2016). The latter applies convolutions in spectral domains by
introducing the spectral framework, which has been widely used in
existing works (Chai et al., 2019). Yu and Yin et al., (2017) propose a
spatio-temporal graph convolutional network (STGCN), which formu­
lates traffic prediction problem on graphs and builds the model by
complete convolutional structures with faster training speed and fewer
parameters. To capture the varying spatial dependencies among traffic
data, a dynamic spatio-temporal graph convolutional neural network
(DSTGCN) is proposed, which can model dynamic spatial dependencies
by finding the changes of the Laplacian matrix. Zhao and Song et al.
(2020) design a temporal graph convolutional network (T-GCN) model,
which combines the graph convolutional network (GCN) and the gated
recurrent unit (GRU). In T-GCN, the GCN is used to learn complex to­
pological structures for capturing spatial dependencies and the GRU is
used to learn dynamic changes of traffic data for capturing temporal
dependencies. It is worth noting that, strategies for constructing graphs
are often different in different tasks. Some directly use distance infor­
mation to construct graphs (Yu and Yin et al., 2017), and others
construct graph with similarity or correlation (Liu and Chen et al.,
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Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301
2020). However, these strategies of constructing graphs in existing
methods are not suitable for flight data, since there are scheduled flight
plans between some long-distance sectors. For example, there are many
scheduled flights between Beijing Capital Airport and Shanghai Hon­
gqiao Airport. Although these two sectors are far away from each other,
there is still a great spatial dependency between them.
For the temporal dependencies, Wu and Tan (2016) present a deep
architecture combining CNN and LSTM to predict traffic flow. Shi and
Chen et al. (2015) propose a convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) by
extending the fully connected LSTM (FC-LSTM) to build a trainable
model for end-to-end precipitation nowcasting problems. Furthermore,
attention mechanisms are widely applied to various domains due to
their high efficiency and flexibility in modelling temporal dependencies
(Vaswani and Shazeer et al., 2017; Devlin and Chang et al., 2019; Park
and Lee et al., 2020; Zheng and Fan et al., 2020), and the core idea is to
adaptively focus on the most relevant features according to the input
data.
In summary, in the field of ATFM, there is a lack of satisfactory
performance in capturing the complex spatial and temporal correlation
of the airspace. Therefore, for temporal dimensional modelling, we
employ a temporal attention (TA) module to directly access past features
in long input sequence, which contributes to mining complex temporal
dependencies. For spatial dimensional modelling, despite GCN has been
proven to be suitable for processing data with irregular structure, how to
construct the graph reasonably in GCN is still an open problem. Thus, we
propose a dual-graph module specifically for the characteristics of air
traffic flow. Specifically, since adjacent sectors have flow transfer
characteristics, an adjacency graph based on flight trajectory is
designed. Since there are flow dependencies in origin-destination (OD)
sectors, an OD graph based on OD pairs is proposed. In addition,
considering aircraft trajectories have obvious path dependencies, we
design a path-based spatial embedding module to capture the long path
dependencies.
3. Problem definition
3.1. Air traffic flow
Air traffic flow is defined as the number of aircrafts at a certain time
in a specific area. In air traffic flow management, the sectors are a
number of polygonal areas with different sizes geographically. Since air
traffic flow management is based on sectors, we focus on the number of
aircrafts in sectors in this paper. Specifically, we construct a graph to
model the national air traffic flow transfer pattern, where each sector is a
node of the graph. Each node has the property of traffic flow, and the
edge represents relationship between different nodes. Putting it into
K. Cai et al.
Fig. 2. The framework of the proposed TAaDGCN. GCN: Graph Convolution Network; FC: Fully Connected.
mathematical terms, the whole airspace sectors are regarded as a graph
structure, and each sector is a node v ∈ V of the graph, where V repre­
sents the sector set, as shown in Fig. 1 (a). Each node on the network
t
generates a flow vector Xi = [Xit0 , Xit1 , …, Xi j , …], as shown by the solid
lines in Fig. 1 (b). The flow of all sectors at the tj -th time slice is repre­
t t t t
sented as X(tj ) = [X1j , X2j , …, Xi j , …XNj ] ∈ RN , where N is the number of
t novel temporal attention aware dual-graph convolution network
sectors and Xi j ∈ R1 represents the air traffic flow of the i-th sector at the
tj -th time slice.
3.2. Air traffic flow prediction
Given the historical flight flow of all sectors with a fixed length of
time, the ATFP problem can be defined as a multi-step spatio-temporal
prediction problem for all airspace sectors, i.e., learning a function f :
RN×P →RN×Q that maps the flight flow of P historical time steps X(tj − P+1) ,
…, X(tj ) to the flight flow in the next Q time steps X(tj +1) , …, X(tj +Q) :
( )
X (tj +1) , …, X (tj +Q) = f X (tj − P+1) , …, X (tj ) , (1)
where, X(tj +1) , …, X(tj +Q) are the output of our model, and X(tj +Q) =
t +Q t +Q t +Q t +Q
[X1j , X2j , …, Xi j , …, XNj ] ∈ RN is flow of all sectors at the (tj +
Q)-th time slice. In ATFP, the spatial dependencies between different
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Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301
sectors should be considered to improve prediction accuracy.
4. Method
To model the temporal and spatial dependencies of air traffic flow
and predict flight flow of all sectors across the country, we propose a
(TAaDGCN), and the overall architecture of the proposed model is
shown in Fig. 2. Considering the flow transfer characteristics between
adjacent sectors and the flow dependencies of origin-destination (OD)
sectors, we design a complementary dual-graph module to capture the
adjacent dependencies and OD dependencies. In addition, we employ a
temporal attention (TA) module for modelling the evolution of temporal
information. Due to the long-path dependencies of air traffic flow, the
spatial embedding (SE) based on path is designed, and the TA module is
implemented after concatenating the input and the SE. Specifically, the
input is firstly concatenated with the generated spatial embedding
vectors, and then into the encoder-decoder architecture. In the encoder
and the decoder, to take multiple spatial and temporal dependencies
into account, L ST blocks are designed. Each ST block consists of a novel
complementary dual-graph module and two temporal attention mech­
anisms. Between the encoder and the decoder, a transform layer is added
to model the relationships between historical P time steps and future Q
K. Cai et al. Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301

Fig. 3. Dual-graph. (a) The adjacency graph based on flight trajectory (b) The OD graph based on OD pairs.

time steps. By stacking ST blocks, our model can effectively model the Following this idea, we build the adjacency graph based on historical
complex temporal and spatial dependencies of air traffic flow, and can flight trajectories by using the number of flights from a sector to another
achieve a state-of-the-art performance. The details of each component sector. Specifically, suppose there are Nf historical flight trajectories: [F1 ,
are described as follows: F2 , …, Fi , …, FNf ], and the i-th trajectory Fi can be represented as : [fi0 , fi1 ,
…, fimi ], where fi0 represents the origin route point of the trajectory, fimi
4.1. Spatial dual-graph represents the destination route point, and mi represents the number of
route points of Fi . Then, the number of flights FlowAdj (va , vb ) between
Graph generation plays an important role in tasks that use GCN sector va and sector vb can be calculated as formula (2), and the number
(Bruna et al., 2013; Defferrard et al., 2016; Kipf and Welling et al., of flights between any two sectors FlowAdj ∈ RN×N can be calculated by
2016). Although it has been proven that GCN can effectively capture traversal.
irregular data relationships, how to construct graphs is still an unsolved Nf {
∑ ∑
mi
problem, especially in the air traffic field. The weight between nodes on FlowAdj (va , vb ) = y, y =
1, fij ∈ va , fij+1 ∈ vb
, (2)
graph represents the dependency and mutual influence. Since any sector i=1 j=0
0, others
has significant dependencies with its neighbors, distance is usually used /
to calculate the weight between nodes in road traffic, and short distance ∑
N

represents large weight, which is very reasonable in many fields. How­ WAdj (va , vb ) = FlowAdj (va , vb ) FlowAdj (va , vα ). (3)
α=1
ever, this is not the case in air traffic. For air traffic flow, there are two
dependencies worth considering. Firstly, the dependency between Finally, weight matrix of the adjacency graph, WAdj , is defined as the
adjacent sectors needs to be considered. Due to the certain directionality normalized number of flights as formula (3), and the diagonal values of
of air traffic flow, the influence between different adjacent sectors is WAdj are directly set to 0.
very different. Secondly, due to the scheduled planning of the air traffic,
some origin-destination sector pairs will also have great dependency 4.1.2. The OD graph based on OD pairs
although they are far away. Therefore, we construct a spatial dual-graph There are scheduled flight plans between some long-distance sectors.
structure specifically to capture the two dependencies between sectors Therefore, although some origin-destination sector pairs are far away,
more effectively, which includes the adjacent graph and the OD graph. they also have a great dependency. For example, there are many
Specifically, the adjacent graph is constructed according to the historical scheduled flights between Beijing Capital Airport and Shanghai Hon­
flight trajectories, while the OD graph modelling long-distance sector gqiao Airport. Although they are far away, there is still a great de­
relationship is constructed according to the origin-destination pairs in pendency of traffic flow between them. Therefore, we utilize the origin-
the flight plan, as shown in Fig. 3. From these two different perspectives, destination pairs to build the OD graph. Specifically, we use historical
the two complementary graphs can capture the influence between the flight mission data [F1 , F2 , …, Fi , …, FNf ] to count the number of flights
short-distance adjacent sectors and potential influence between the between any OD pair as formula (4). Then, the weight matrix of the OD
long-distance OD sectors. graph, WOD , is defined as the normalized number of flights between OD
In this section, we firstly describe how to construct the adjacency pairs sectors as formula (5), and the diagonal values of WOD are directly
graph based on the historical flight trajectories GAdj = (V, EAdj , WAdj ) and set to 0.
the OD graph based on OD pairs GOD = (V, EOD , WOD ). V is the set of {
Nf
nodes (|V| = N) and each node represents a sector. EAdj and WAdj FlowOD (va , vb ) =
∑
z, z =
1, fi0 ∈ va , fimi ∈ vb
, (4)
represent the edges between nodes and the weights between nodes, i=1
0, others
respectively. Both GAdj and GOD share the same nodes, but have different /
edges and weights. ∑
N
WOD (va , vb ) = FlowOD (va , vb ) FlowOD (va , vα ). (5)
α=1
4.1.1. The adjacency graph based on flight trajectory
In view of the air traffic flow pattern, the flight flow between adja­
cent sectors may affect each other. However, the impacts between 4.2. Path-based spatial embedding block
different adjacent sectors are very distinct due to the certain direction­
ality of flight flow. For example, although Taiyuan and Shijiazhuang, as The dual-graph module reflects the relationship between the adja­
well as Taiyuan and Hohhot are adjacent sectors, the flow of the former cent sectors and the long-distance OD sector pairs. However, the de­
is larger than the latter due to the air traffic flow pattern. Naturally, the pendencies on the long path during flight can not be captured.
weight of the former must be much larger than the latter. Therefore, a path-based spatial embedding module is proposed, which

5
K. Cai et al. Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301

Fig. 4. Attention mechanism models temporal correlation.

incorporates the long path information during flight into prediction
models. Specifically, the proposed spatial embedding (SE) block encodes
sector nodes as vectors that preserve the long path information.
The idea of spatial embedding block is inspired by word2vec in
natural language processing (NLP) (Mikolov and Chen et al., 2013; Le
and Mikolov, 2014), which can encode each word into a vector while
retaining the contextual meaning of the word. The proposed path-based
spatial embedding block firstly performs a random walk on the con­
structed adjacency graph to obtain multiple paths, and then the obtained
multiple paths can be used as the input of the skip-gram network, which
is a shallow feedforward neural network and can embed each node as a
vector while retaining the contextual dependencies in the path (Grover
and Leskovec, 2016). The details of the random walk and the skip-gram
network are described in the appendix. Through the processes above
mentioned, the vector representation of each node can be obtained,
while retaining the long path information. Subsequently, we obtain the
spatial embedding, represented as sevi ∈ Rd , where vi ∈ V.
4.3. Spatio-temporal block
Spatio-temporal block is formed as a “sandwich” structure which
includes two temporal attention layers and one spatial graph convolu­
tion layer in between. The attention layer is implemented for extracting
problem of the irregular structure graph. Taking the air traffic flow at
time tj as an example, for a single graph W ∈ {WAdj , WOD }, suppose x ∈
RN is a signal defined on tj -th time slice graph. The spectral convolution
of the signal x and the kernel Θ on graph W can be defined as (Kipf and
Welling et al., 2016):
( )
Θ∗G(W) x = Θ(ML )x = Θ UΛU T x = UΘ(Λ)U T x, (7)
(8)
1 1
ML = In − D− 2 WAdj D− 2 = UΛU T ∈ RN×N ,
where ML is the Laplacian matrix that can represent the graph W, In is an
∑
identity matrix, D is a diagonal degree matrix with Dii = Wij . U is the
j
matrix of the eigenvectors of the normalized graph Laplacian matrix, Λ
is the diagonal matrix of the eigenvalues of ML .
The above graph convolution operation transforms both of signal x
and kernel Θ into the Fourier spectrum domain, multiplies the trans­
formed results, and then performs inverse Fourier transform to obtain
the final result of the graph convolution operation. However, the
computational complexity of equation (7) is O (n2 ). Therefore, Cheby­
shev polynomial approximation is adopted to reduce the cost of equation
(7) to O (K|ε|):
∑
K− 1

temporal features, and the length of the time dimension will not be Θ∗G(W) x = Θ(ML )x ≈ ̃L )x,
θk Tk (M (9)
changed after the attention layer.
k=0

where θk ∈ Rk is a vector of polynomial coefficients. K is the kernel size

4.3.1. Spatial dual-graph convolution of graph convolution, which determines the maximum radius of the
To fully exploit dual-graph structure containing complex spatial ̃L = 2ML − In , λmax is the maximum
convolution from the central node. M
correlation information, a novel spatial dual-graph convolution layer is λmax

proposed, as defined in formula (6): eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix. Tk (M̃L ) ∈ RN×N is the Chebyshev
( ∐ ) polynomial of order k. For multi channels input X(tj ) ∈ RN×d , the graph
Hl+1 = σ Θ∗G(W) Hl , (6) d
∑
convolution can be generalized by Θi ∗G(W) xi , where xi ∈ RN×1 is the
W∈{WAdj ,WOD }
i=1
i-th feature channel of X(tj ) .
where Hl ∈ RT×N×d and Hl+1 ∈ RT×N×d represent feature vectors of N
Overall, the dual-graph convolution module takes Hl ∈ RT×N×d as
node in layer l and l + 1 respectively, N is the number of sectors, T adj
input. For all T time slices Hlt ∈ RN×d and Hlt ∈ RN×d , the equal graph
represents the time dimension, and d is the feature dimension. σ denotes
the activation function,
∐
denotes the aggregation function, e.g., sum, convolution operation with the same parameters is imposed in parallel,
adj
max, average etc. WAdj , WOD are the graph based on flight trajectories and then T × HOD
lt ∈ R
N×d
and T × Hlt ∈ RN×d can be calculated using
and the graph based on OD pairs, respectively. Θ represents the the OD graph and the adjacency graph, respectively. Subsequently, the
convolution kernel, ∗G(W) represents graph convolution operator on output of OD graph convolution HlOD ∈ RT×N×d is obtained by concate­
graph W based on the conception of spectral graph convolution. nating T × HOD
lt ∈ R
N×d
on the time dimension, while the output of ad­
Spectral graph convolution extends the idea of the traditional jacency graph convolution Hl
adj
∈ RT×N×d is obtained by concatenating
convolution into the spectral domain to solve the feature extraction

6
K. Cai et al. Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301

adj
T × Hlt ∈ RN×d . The final output of the dual-graph convolution module HL′ ∈ RQ×N×d is input to the decoder which has the same structure as the
Hdual ∈ RT×N×d is obtained by adding HOD and Hl
adj
as follows: encoder, and the predicted value Y ̂ ∈ RQ×N is finally generated after
l
several spatio-temporal blocks and two fully connected layers. Our
H dual
=H OD
+H . adj
(10) TAaDGCN is trained by minimizing the mean square error (MSE) be­
tween the ground truth Yi,tj and the predicted value Y
̂ i,tj :
4.3.2. Temporal attention
In temporal dimension, the flight flow of a certain sector is related to 1 ∑N ∑ Q
( )
loss = ̂ i,tj 2 .
Yi,tj − Y (15)
its previous observations, and the correlation changes nonlinearly with NQ i=1 tj =1
the time step. To mine complex temporal dependencies, a temporal
attention (TA) module is employed. Specifically, the attention mecha­
5. Experiments
nism is used to adaptively assign different importance to the previous
observations, as shown in Fig. 4. For node v1 , the hidden state of layer Hl
5.1. Experiments settings
at step tj is directly determined by the information from time steps
earlier than the tj -th step, formulated as follows: 5.1.1. Dataset
∑ ( ) The original data is provided by the Aviation Data Communication
h(l)
vi ,tj = βtj ,t ⋅fValue h(l− 1)
, (11)
t∈N
vi ,t
Corporation (ADCC), China. It mainly includes dynamic flight operation
data and static airspace data. The flight operation data covers the flight
tj

plan data and the real trajectory data from September 1, 2018 to
where hvi ,tj represents the hidden state of layer Hl at step tj , N repre­
(l)
tj
November 31, 2018, with an average daily number of flights of 18,000.
sents a set of time steps before tj , fValue ( ⋅) represents a learnable trans­ The flight plan data includes airports, planned flight routes, planned
form, which corresponds to the value vector in the attention. βtj ,t departure and arrival time, real departure and arrival time, etc. The real
represents the attention score, defined as the correlation between time trajectory data is composed of flight mission ID, route point names,
step tj and t: latitude and longitude, flight level, speed, etc. The airspace data includes
(
1)
) (
1)
) sector names, longitudes and latitudes of 1770 route points and 302
fKey h(l−
vi ,t , fQuery h(l−
vi ,tj airports, as well as the boundaries of various sectors. From temporal
utj ,t = √̅̅̅ , (12)
d dimension, the data is further divided into three parts: 70% for training,
( ) 10% for validating and 20% for testing.
exp utj ,t
βtj ,t = ∑ ( ), (13)
tr ∈N t exp utj ,tr
5.1.2. Evaluation metrics
To demonstrate the performance of the proposed model, three
j

where fKey , fQuery devote two learnable transforms, respectively, which widely used metrics are applied, i.e., Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root
correspond to the key vector and query vector in the attention (Vaswani Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error
and Shazeer et al., 2017). 〈⋅, ⋅〉 represents the dot product operation, d is (MAPE), which are defined as:
a scaling factor. In practice, attention function is simultaneously calcu­ 1∑ n

lated on a set of query vectors that are packed into a matrix MQ . Simi­ MAE = y i |,
|yi − ̂ (16)
n i=1
larly, key vectors and value vectors are also packed into matrices MK and
MV , respectively. Therefore, hvi ,tj can be computed as:
(l) √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
1∑ n

( ) RMSE = (yi − ̂y i )2 , (17)

MQ MK T n i=1
h(l)
vi ,tj = softmax √̅̅̅ MV . (14)
d
n ⃒
∑ ⃒yi − ̂
⃒
y i ⃒⃒ 100%
In this way, our model can adaptively select the relevant hidden MAPE = ⃒
⃒ ̂ × , (18)
y ⃒ n
states and model the complex temporal correlation. Since attention can i=1 i

directly access the past information in long input sequences, our model
where n is the number of testing samples. ̂ y i and yi denote the predicted
performs well in long-term dependencies modelling. Since formula (14)
value and the ground truth of air traffic flow, respectively. In addition,
is implemented for each time slice, the length of the time dimension will
we use range of prediction results at different time steps to analyze the
not be changed after extracting features in the attention layer.
multi-step prediction performance of different methods, which is
calculated as the difference between the maximum prediction error and
the minimum prediction error on different time steps.
4.4. Encoder-decoder

As shown in Fig. 2, X ∈ RP×N is firstly concatenated with the gener­
ated spatial embedding vectors, and then converted to H0 ∈ RP×N×d by
two fully connected layers. Next, H0 ∈ RP×N×d is fed to the encoder. The
encoder consists of L spatio-temporal blocks with residual, in which the
residual structure is conducive to the back propagation of errors. Since
the spatio-temporal blocks will not change the dimensions of the input
feature, the encoder will encode the input data as HL ∈ RP×N×d . Followed
by the encoder, a transform layer is designed to change the time
dimension from historical sequence features HL ∈ RP×N×d into future
sequence features HL′ ∈ RQ×N×d . The transform layer is composed of two
convolution layers, in which the first convolution layer is followed by a
Relu activation function, and the second convolution directly generates
the output of the transform layer. Through the transform layer, the time
dimension is transformed from P to Q. Next, the future sequence feature
5.2. Baselines
We compare the proposed method with other four flow prediction
methods: ARIMA, it is a well-known model used to predict future values
in a time series (Mehrmolaei and Keyvanpour, 2016); Support vector
regression (SVR), a single sector traffic prediction model is developed
based on the support vector machine (Zhang and Jiang et al., 2016);
Spatio-temporal graph convolutional network (STGCN), it combines the
spatial graph convolutional layers and the temporal gated convolutional
layers (Yu and Yin et al., 2017); GMAN, it is a graph multi-attention
network for traffic prediction (Zheng and Fan et al., 2020).

7
K. Cai et al. Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301

Table 1
The experimental results (Average ± Standard Deviation) of the proposed TAaDGCN and other four comparison methods.
Metric Method 20min 40min 60min 80min 100min 120min Range

MAE TAaDGCN 5.77 ± 0.01 5.91 ± 0.01 5.99 ± 0.01 6.02 ± 0.02 6.07 ± 0.03 6.20 ± 0.05 0.43
STGCN 5.83 ± 0.03 6.23 ± 0.05 6.44 ± 0.08 6.69 ± 0.07 6.99 ± 0.10 7.34 + 0.22 1.51
GMAN 7.39 ± 0.09 6.75 ± 0.08 6.35 ± 0.06 6.36 ± 0.03 6.77 ± 0.07 7.44 ± 0.10 1.05
SVR 7.60 ± 0.00 9.17 ± 0.01 10.24 ± 0.02 11.30 ± 0.03 12.30 ± 0.04 13.27 ± 0.05 5.67
ARIMA 8.39 10.77 12.63 14.65 16.80 18.98 10.59
RMSE TAaDGCN 8.04 ± 0.03 8.26 ± 0.01 8.34 ± 0.01 8.38 ± 0.02 8.45 ± 0.03 8.61 ± 0.06 0.57
STGCN 8.19 ± 0.05 8.72 ± 0.10 8.99 ± 0.13 9.31 ± 0.12 9.75 ± 0.17 10.35 ± 0.37 2.16
GMAN 10.25 ± 0.16 9.28 ± 0.13 8.74 ± 0.09 8.78 ± 0.03 9.36 ± 0.05 10.37 ± 0.11 1.63
SVR 10.48 ± 0.02 12.60 ± 0.04 14.10 ± 0.06 15.60 ± 0.09 16.99 ± 0.12 18.28 ± 0.16 7.8
ARIMA 11.34 14.22 16.33 18.68 21.09 23.54 12.2
MAPE TAaDGCN 0.23 ± 0.00 0.24 ± 0.00 0.25 ± 0.01 0.26 ± 0.01 0.26 ± 0.01 0.28 ± 0.01 0.05
STGCN 0.23 ± 0.01 0.25 ± 0.01 0.27 ± 0.01 0.29 ± 0.02 0.32 ± 0.03 0.36 ± 0.04 0.13
GMAN 0.36 ± 0.01 0.30 ± 0.01 0.27 ± 0.01 0.28 ± 0.01 0.31 ± 0.01 0.37 ± 0.01 0.10
SVR 0.32 ± 0.00 0.41 ± 0.00 0.49 ± 0.00 0.58 ± 0.00 0.66 ± 0.00 0.74 ± 0.01 0.42
ARIMA 0.35 0.49 0.64 0.81 0.99 1.18 0.83

Fig. 5. Predicted performance of all sectors at different times.

Fig. 6. Number of sectors in different RMSE error intervals for the proposed TAaDGCN and the five variants.

5.3. Experimental results
5.3.1. Model comparison
To demonstrate the prediction performance of the proposed method,
Table 1 shows the experimental results of five different methods on the
real aviation data set in the next 20 min (Q =1), 40 min (Q =2), 60 min
(Q =3), 80 min (Q =4), 100 min (Q =5) and 120 min (Q =6). To compare
the variances of different methods, we list the average and standard
deviation values of different metrics for 5 runs. As shown in Table 1, we
can observe that our method has the following advantages: (1) Low error
value. Whether compared with the traditional methods or the deep
learning methods, our method has achieved the lowest error value. The
improvement is significant compared with non-deep learning methods,
which is because non-deep learning methods ignore the vital spatial
information. In addition, our method achieves a best performance
among the deep learning methods, which is due to the consideration of
the characteristics of air traffic in our method. (2) More robust. In terms
of stability, although the traditional methods are more stable, the large
prediction error is not suitable for practical applications. In contrast,
deep learning methods can obtain better but unstable results since they
have a large number of parameters. However, our method combines the
characteristics of dual graphs for capturing multiple spatial and tem­
poral dependencies, and can still achieve more robust results than other
deep learning methods. (3) Significant advantage in error range. Our
method obtains better multi-step prediction accuracy, especially when
the prediction interval is long. For example, when prediction interval is
120 min, MAE is decreased by 1.14 (improved by 15.53%), RMSE is
decreased by 2.19 (improved by 21.16%) compared with the best
baseline model. Besides, our method achieves the lowest range of pre­
diction results on different time steps, which represents the difference

8
K. Cai et al.
Fig. 7. The performance of the proposed TAaDGCN with TAaDGCN-NG1 and TAaDGCN-NG2 in all sectors.
between the maximum.
prediction error and the minimum prediction error on different time
steps is small. In practical applications, the long-term horizon prediction
is more important, which provides air traffic controllers with more time
to dispatch aircrafts and eliminate potential conflicts. (4) Fewer
abnormally large errors and low relative error. MAE is defined as the
average of the absolute value of the error which measures the actual
error, while RMSE is defined as the square root of the sum of squared
errors which magnifies the effect of larger errors and is extremely sus­
ceptible to outliers. As shown in Table 1, the MAE value of the proposed
method is smaller than other comparison methods, which proves that
the proposed method can predict more accurately. The smaller RMSE
9
Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301
value proves the proposed method predicts fewer abnormally large er­
rors, i.e., more stable than other comparison methods. In addition, the
proposed TAaDGCN can achieve the lowest MAPE values, which shows
that the prediction error is the smallest based on the original values.
5.3.2. Variant comparison
To analyze the effect of each component in the proposed model, we
evaluate five variants by removing graph convolution, temporal atten­
tion, SE block, adjacency graph, and OD pairs graph from our TAaDGCN,
respectively, called TAaDGCN-NGCN (without graph convolution),
TAaDGCN-Nat (without temporal attention), TAaDGCN-NSE (without
spatial embedding), TAaDGCN-NG1 (without adjacency graph), and
K. Cai et al.
Fig. 8. Predicted air traffic flow and MAE error in three representative sectors, namely Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai, when Q is 1.
TAaDGCN-NG2 (without OD graph).
1) Evaluation on all variants
We firstly evaluate the prediction performance of all sectors at
different times, as shown in Fig. 5 and we observe that no matter which
component is removed, prediction errors will increase, indicating that
each component plays an essential role in the entire model. Specifically,
the results of TAaDGCN-NGCN are the worst, mainly because the graph
convolution plays a very important role in extracting spatial structure
features. In addition, the error slope of TAaDGCN-NAt increases signif­
icantly when Q is greater than 4, since the attention mechanism which
accesses directly the past features in the long input sequences is more
important in long-term prediction. Fig. 6 shows the number of sectors in
different RMSE error intervals for the proposed TAaDGCN and the five
variants. Observing from it the proposed TAaDGCN has more sectors in
smaller error intervals compared with the other five variants.
2) Evaluation complementary on dual-graph
To demonstrate the superiority of the proposed dual-graph convo­
lution based on aerostatic characteristics, we compare the performance
10
Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301
of the proposed TAaDGCN with TAaDGCN-NG1 and TAaDGCN-NG2 in
all sectors, as shown in Fig. 7. It can be shown that the TAaDGCN with
dual graphs can achieve the lowest prediction error in all sectors.
Furthermore, for two variants, TAaDGCN-NG1 performs better on 52%
of sectors, while TAaDGCN-NG2 performs better on 48% of sectors,
which shows that the adjacency graph and the OD pair graph are crucial
and complementary in air traffic flow prediction.
5.4. Case study
5.4.1. Analysis of typical sector prediction results
To further investigate the proposed TAaDGCN, we selected three
representative sectors to show the average prediction results for
consecutive 24 h. For comparison, two deep learning methods consid­
ering the spatial dependencies i.e., GMAN and STGCN are used. Fig. 8
shows the predicted air traffic flow and MAE error in three representa­
tive sectors, namely Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai, when Q is 1. The
black solid lines represent ground truth, blue solid lines, green solid lines
and red solid lines represent predicted flow in STGCN, GMAN and the
proposed TAaDGCN, respectively. The blue, green and red histograms
represent the MAE of STGCN, GMAN and the proposed TAaDGCN
respectively. It can be seen from Fig. 8 that the proposed TAaDGCN can
K. Cai et al.
Fig. 9. Flow curves of four areas (two areas with abnormal flow, two areas with normal flow) in a certain period of time.
more effectively capture the dynamic changes of air traffic flow, and
obtain smaller prediction error at most hours compared with the other
two deep learning methods.
5.4.2. Case analysis of model robustness
We have selected some cases to demonstrate that our model is robust
to sudden reduction of air traffic flow. Fig. 9 shows the flow curves of
four sectors in a same period of time, where yellow curve indicates the
actual value of the flow and blue curve indicates the predicted value of
our model. Obviously, the flow in sector A and sector B on September
15th is anomalous (compared to other days), while the flow of sector C
and sector D is normal. It can be seen that the proposed model can
achieve accurate prediction results not only under normal conditions,
but also under abnormal conditions.
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Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301
6. Conclusions
This paper proposes a temporal attention aware dual-graph convo­
lution network (TAaDGCN) to predict air traffic flow across national
airspace sectors. Since there is an obvious spatial and temporal depen­
dence of air traffic flow, we have modelled it from both temporal and
spatial perspectives. For spatial dimension, considering the flight flow
transfer characteristics between adjacent sectors and the flow de­
pendencies between origin-destination sector pairs, we have designed a
dual-graph strategy including adjacency graph and origin-destination
(OD) pair graph. The adjacency graph captures the directional de­
pendencies between adjacent sectors, while the OD pair graph captures
the potential influence between the long-distance sectors due to the
fixed flight schedules. In addition, considering the obvious long path
K. Cai et al.
Fig. 10. The schematic diagram of transition probability in the random walk.
Fig. 11. The overall framework of the skip-gram network.
dependencies during flight, we have designed a path-based spatial
embedding module to represent potential related sectors of flight
traversal. For temporal dimension, considering the difficulty of
capturing long temporal dependencies, a temporal attention (TA)
mechanism has been adopted and been implemented after concate­
nating the input history flow and the spatial embedding (SE) based on
path, enabling better fusion of spatial long path and temporal infor­
mation. By stacking the ST blocks in the encoder-decoder architecture,
multiple spatial and temporal dependencies have been effectively
modelled.
By observing the experimental results on real aviation datasets, we
can find that: 1) Compared with other models, our model is able to
achieve better prediction performance, which is reflected in low error
value, more robust, significant advantage in error range, and fewer
abnormally large errors. 2) Each module in the proposed method, i.e.,
dual-graph convolution strategy, path-based spatial embedding module
and temporal attention module, plays an indispensable role. In
Appendix
A Random Walk
12
Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301
particularly, the proposed dual-graph module based on spatial sector
characteristics has superiority in air traffic flow prediction, where the
adjacency graph and the OD pair graph are both crucial and comple­
mentary. 3) The proposed method is applied to a real-world case study,
and the results have shown that our model is robust and can achieve
accurate prediction results compared to other methods. In addition,
since the proposed method captures the general patterns of air traffic
and is independent of the selected data and spatial regions, the findings
are transferable internationally.
Our findings have new managerial implications for air traffic man­
agement. Firstly, the flow prediction in most existing air traffic man­
agement system relies on accurate flight plans that are changing over
time. When the flight plan is changed, management strategies have to be
adjusted accordingly, which is complex and time-consuming. The pro­
posed method focuses on modelling data-driven spatial and temporal
dependence, thus controllers can be aware of the trend of air traffic flow
and make management strategies without accurate flight plan. Sec­
ondly, the information sharing mechanism between regions in the
existing air traffic management is not sufficient. The proposed method
constructs a nationwide network that captures the global spatial and
temporal correlation, enabling controllers to obtain the global impact
when making management decisions. Finally, with the increase of air
traffic flow, inaccurate flow prediction leads controllers to adopt con­
servative strategies, resulting in low airspace utilization and serious
flight delays. At the same time, controllers with heavy workload are
prone to mistakes and omissions. Our study has mined the complex
spatial-temporal dependencies of the air traffic environment, which are
helpful to make more accurate predictions. By obtaining accurate in­
formation about future air traffic flow distribution in advance, con­
trollers are able to anticipate potential risks in advance and then
regulate the flight such as rerouting, ground holding, etc.
However, the research findings in this paper have some limitations
and are open to new direction for further study. Although the proposed
method is able to capture the complex spatio-temporal dependencies in
the current air traffic network, it requires reconstructing the graph
structure and retraining the network if the airspace structure changes
since the designed dual graph is fixed. In the future, we will try to design
dynamic graph structures to accommodate possible dynamic airspace
changes.
Author statement
Kaiquan Cai: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Supervi­
sion; Zhiqi Shen:. Methodology, Software, Validation, Writing - Original
Draft; Xiaoyan Luo: Methodology, Validation, Writing - Review &
Editing; Yue Li: Software, Data Curation, Validation, Resources.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Key Research and Develop­
ment Program of China (No. 2021YFB2601700) and the Funds of the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. U2033215,
U2133210).
K. Cai et al. Journal of Air Transport Management 106 (2023) 102301

Random walk takes any node on the graph as the starting node, and walks according to the probability between nodes to obtain some random paths
(Grover and Leskovec, 2016). The core of the random walk is to define the probability of walking from the current node to the next node. As shown in
Fig. 10, vi , vi− 1 , and vi+1 represent the current node, the traversed node in the previous step and the next walk target respectively. Now the walk starts
with the node ci = vi , for the next walk target ci+1 , transition probability can be generated by the following distribution:
⎧
⎨ αpq (vi− 1 , vi+1 )⋅WAdj (vi , vi+1 ), if (v , v ) ∈ E
(19)
i i+1 Adj
P(ci+1 = vi+1 |ci = vi ) = Z ,
⎩
0, otherwise

where Z represents the normalization constant, WAdj (⋅, ⋅) represents weight between nodes. αpq (vi− 1 , vi+1 ) is transition probability coefficient, and
αpq (vi− 1 , vi+1 ) is defined as:
⎧
⎪
⎪ 1
⎪
⎪ , ifnextwalktargetvi+1 isjustnodevi− 1
⎪
⎪ p
⎨
αpq (vi− 1 , vi+1 ) = 1, if ​ node ​ vi+1 ​ is ​ connected ​ to ​ node ​ vi− 1 (20)
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ 1
⎪
⎪
⎩ , if ​ node ​ vi+1 ​ and ​ node ​ vi− 1 ​ are ​ not ​ connected
q

where, p and q are hyperparameters. When p is large, it is less likely to travel to the visited node vi− 1 . When q is less than 1, it is tend to visit nodes far
away from the node vi− 1 , such as vi+1 .
(2)

B The Skip-gram Network

Given a node path set composed of unlabeled nodes, the skip-gram network can generate a vector that expresses the context of path for each node
(Grover and Leskovec, 2016). Specifically, we use each current node as an input to a log-linear classifier with continuous projection layers, and predict
the neighbor nodes of the current node in the same path. The overall framework is shown in Fig. 11. By training the network, we can obtain the weight
of hidden layers as vector representation for each node, which can imply the context of the node in the path set.
To optimize above network, the objective function is defined, which maximizes the log probability of the neighborhood NS (v) for a node v, given by
f:
∑
max logPr(NS (v)|f (v)) (21)
f
v∈V

where f is a mapping function, V is node set.

To make the optimization problem tractable, conditional independence assumption and symmetry assumption in feature space are defined.
Conditional independence assumption is the likelihood of observing a neighborhood node is independent of observing any other neighborhood node
given the feature representation of the source node, therefore, Pr(NS (v)|f(v)) can be factorized as:
∏
Pr(NS (v)|f (v)) = Pr(ni |f (v)) (22)
ni ∈NS (v)

The symmetry assumption in feature space can model the conditional likelihood of each source-neighbor node pair as a softmax unit, which is
parameterized by the dot product of their features:
exp(f (ni )⋅f (v))
Pr(ni |f (v)) = ∑ (23)
u∈V exp(f (u)⋅f (v))

By the two assumptions, Formula (23) can be approximated as:

[ ]
∑ ∑ ∑
max − log exp(f (u) ⋅ f (v)) + f (ni ) ⋅ f (v) (24)
f
v∈V u∈V ni ∈NS (v)

By using stochastic gradient descent over the model parameters, we can obtain vector representation for each node and preserve the path semantics
of the node.

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