OpFlow: Learning Opportunity-Conditioned Choice Potentials for Robust OD Flow Prediction
2026-07-03 • Machine Learning
Machine Learning
AI summaryⓘ
The authors address the problem of predicting how many people travel between places in a city, which is important for urban planning. Traditional deep learning models struggle when conditions change because they learn from raw trip counts that mix total demand and how demand is split among destinations. They propose OpFlow, a new approach that separates how much demand an origin generates from how that demand is distributed, focusing on the transferable relationship between spatial factors and destination preferences. Experiments show OpFlow is better at handling changes in the environment compared to older methods.
origin-destination flowdistribution shiftdeep learningspatial interactionexposure-to-choice lawrow-centered potentialurban analyticsdemand allocationtransferability
Authors
Changjian Liu, Yong Gao, Yuqing Wang, Leyi Su, Honglei Guo, Zhiyang Wang, Xiaoyu Wang, Fan Zhang
Abstract
Origin-destination (OD) flow prediction is central to urban analytics, yet deep models trained on raw counts remain vulnerable to distribution shift. The core problem is that raw count supervision cannot distinguish transferable choice mechanisms from environment-specific shortcuts. Raw OD count mixes two objects: how much demand an origin produces and how that demand is allocated across destinations. We argue that the transferable object is the exposure-to-choice law that maps spatial conditions to relative destination preferences. We propose OpFlow, a mechanism-constrained framework that learns row-centered choice potentials and reconstructs flows by combining the induced allocation with a separately calibrated origin scale. Under distribution shift, spatial exposures and the induced allocations are allowed to vary; what transfers is the conditional map from exposure states to relative choice potentials. Theoretically, we characterize the identifiable row-centered potential and show that classical spatial interaction laws are restricted log-potential cases. Controlled synthetic shifts and a real-world experiment show OpFlow improves robustness under environment shifts.