Synthetic Datasets for Machine Learning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs using PDEs

Jost Arndt, Utku Isil, Michael Detzel, Wojciech Samek, Jackie Ma

Published 2025-02-06Version 1

Many physical processes can be expressed through partial differential equations (PDEs). Real-world measurements of such processes are often collected at irregularly distributed points in space, which can be effectively represented as graphs; however, there are currently only a few existing datasets. Our work aims to make advancements in the field of PDE-modeling accessible to the temporal graph machine learning community, while addressing the data scarcity problem, by creating and utilizing datasets based on PDEs. In this work, we create and use synthetic datasets based on PDEs to support spatio-temporal graph modeling in machine learning for different applications. More precisely, we showcase three equations to model different types of disasters and hazards in the fields of epidemiology, atmospheric particles, and tsunami waves. Further, we show how such created datasets can be used by benchmarking several machine learning models on the epidemiological dataset. Additionally, we show how pre-training on this dataset can improve model performance on real-world epidemiological data. The presented methods enable others to create datasets and benchmarks customized to individual requirements. The source code for our methodology and the three created datasets can be found on https://github.com/github-usr-ano/Temporal_Graph_Data_PDEs.