When Correlations Mislead: Confounder-Aware Multi-View Urban Region Representation Learning

arXiv:2609.15305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban region representation learning commonly combines heterogeneous data sources, such as mobility flows, points of interest, and land-use information, to support tasks including mobility analysis, public safety forecasting, and service demand estimation. Existing multi-view methods typically improve region embeddings by strengthening interactions across views. However, such methods often overlook view-specific regional structures and may propagate correlations induced by shared latent factors, which can reduce the stability of downstream predictions. To overcome this major limitation, we propose CURE, a confounder-aware framework for multi-view urban region representation learning. CURE first encodes each view with its regional graph structure, estimates a shared latent component, and then reduces its projected influence before cross-view interaction. A hierarchical graph-aware fusion module subsequently aggregates the residual view representations using local and global regional contexts Experiments on three real-world cities show that CURE improves predictive performance, remains robust under missing and noisy input views, and provides reliable cross-view integration through shared component separation and context-dependent view weighting.

Abstract:Urban region representation learning commonly combines heterogeneous data sources, such as mobility flows, points of interest, and land-use information, to support tasks including mobility analysis, public safety forecasting, and service demand estimation. Existing multi-view methods typically improve region embeddings by strengthening interactions across views. However, such methods often overlook view-specific regional structures and may propagate correlations induced by shared latent factors, which can reduce the stability of downstream predictions. To overcome this major limitation, we propose CURE, a confounder-aware framework for multi-view urban region representation learning. CURE first encodes each view with its regional graph structure, estimates a shared latent component, and then reduces its projected influence before cross-view interaction. A hierarchical graph-aware fusion module subsequently aggregates the residual view representations using local and global regional contexts Experiments on three real-world cities show that CURE improves predictive performance, remains robust under missing and noisy input views, and provides reliable cross-view integration through shared component separation and context-dependent view weighting.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.15305 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.15305v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.15305 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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When Correlations Mislead: Confounder-Aware Multi-View Urban Region Representation Learning

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