# Robustness of Spatio-temporal Graph Neural Networks for Fault Location in Partially Observable Distribution Grids

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20403 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20403/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Fault Location in Power Distribution Systems via Deep Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09464/) (2018)
- [A comparison of LSTM and GRU networks for learning symbolic sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02248/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Assessing the Generalization of Graph Neural Networks for Fault Location Across Increasing Distributed Energy Resource Penetration Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29293/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fault location in distribution grids is critical for reliability and minimizing outage durations. Yet, it remains challenging due to partial observability, given sparse measurement infrastructure. Recent works show promising results by combining Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for spatio-temporal learning. Still, many modern GNN architectures remain untested for this grid application, while existing GNN solutions have not explored GNN topology definitions beyond simply adopting the full grid topology to construct the GNN graph. We address these gaps by (i) systematically comparing a newly proposed graph-forming strategy (measured-only) to the traditional full-topology approach, and (ii) introducing STGNN (Spatio-temporal GNN) models based on GraphSAGE and an improved Graph Attention (GATv2), for distribution grid fault location; (iii) benchmarking them against state-of-the-art STGNN and RNN baselines on the IEEE 123-bus feeder. In our experiments, all evaluated STGNN variants achieve high performance and consistently outperform a pure RNN baseline, with improvements up to 11 percentage points F1. Among STGNN models, the newly explored RGATv2 and RGSAGE achieve only marginally higher F1 scores. Still, STGNNs demonstrate superior stability, with tight confidence intervals (within +/- 1.4%) compared to the RNN baseline (up to +/- 7.5%) across different experiment runs. Finally, our proposed reduced GNN topology (measured-only) shows clear benefits in both (i) model training time (6-fold reduction) and (ii) model performance (up to 11 points F1). This suggests that measured-only graphs offer a more practical, efficient, and robust framework for partially observable distribution grids.