# VisitHGNN: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Modeling Point-of-Interest Visit Patterns

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02702 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02702/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [How Attentive are Graph Attention Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14491/) (2021)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Deep Gravity: enhancing mobility flows generation with deep neural networks and geographic information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00489/) (2020)
- [Learning Geo-Contextual Embeddings for Commuting Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01690/) (2020)
- [A Machine Learning Approach to Modeling Human Migration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05462/) (2017)
- [An Interdisciplinary Survey on Origin-destination Flows Modeling: Theory and Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10048/) (2023)
- [Predicting commuter flows in spatial networks using a radiation model based on temporal ranges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.4849/) (2014)
- [Influence of sociodemographic characteristics on human mobility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7895/) (2014)
- [Context-Adaptive Graph Neural Networks for Next POI Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10329/) (2025)
- [AdaptGOT: A Pre-trained Model for Adaptive Contextual POI Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21612/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding how urban residents travel between neighborhoods and destinations is critical for transportation planning, mobility management, and public health. By mining historical origin-to-destination flow patterns with spatial, temporal, and functional relations among urban places, we estimate probabilities of visits from neighborhoods to specific destinations. These probabilities capture neighborhood-level contributions to citywide vehicular and foot traffic, supporting demand estimation, accessibility assessment, and multimodal planning. Particularly, we introduce VisitHGNN, a heterogeneous, relation-specific graph neural network designed to predict visit probabilities at individual Points of interest (POIs). POIs are characterized using numerical, JSON-derived, and textual attributes, augmented with fixed summaries of POI--POI spatial proximity, temporal co-activity, and brand affinity, while census block groups (CBGs) are described with 72 socio-demographic variables. CBGs are connected via spatial adjacency, and POIs and CBGs are linked through distance-annotated cross-type edges. Inference is constrained to a distance-based candidate set of plausible origin CBGs, and training minimizes a masked Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to yield probability distribution across the candidate set. Using weekly mobility data from Fulton County, Georgia, USA, VisitHGNN achieves strong predictive performance with mean KL divergence of 0.287, MAE of 0.008, Top-1 accuracy of 0.853, and R-square of 0.892, substantially outperforming pairwise MLP and distance-only baselines, and aligning closely with empirical visitation patterns (NDCG@50 = 0.966); Recall@5 = 0.611). The resulting distributions closely mirror observed travel behavior with high fidelity, highlighting the model's potential for decision support in urban planning, transportation policy, mobility system design, and public health.