Diffusion-based Kriging Model with Graph-enhanced Attention

In web-based systems, elements are commonly organized within a graph structure, with each node collecting essential spatio-temporal data. Examples include websites on the World Wide Web, traffic monitors in transportation networks, or sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, sensors are typically deployed sparsely and unevenly, leaving the remaining nodes unobserved. The spatio-temporal kriging task, which infers values at unobserved nodes from observed ones, has thus attracted significant research interest. Due to limitations such as reliance on static graph structures and iterative Graph Convolution Network (GCN) frameworks, accurate kriging remains challenging. To address these issues, we propose a Diffusion-based Kriging Model with Graph-enhanced Attention (DKM-GA). Our approach first introduces a graph-enhanced attention mechanism that dynamically learns more accurate graph structures by combining predefined graph knowledge with global node value similarities. It is then integrated into a diffusion-based framework, which is tailored for the reliance of attention on known values. Therefore, the framework progressively refines the target values using correlated nodes, and the graph-enhanced attention selects more relevant neighbors based on the refined values. Furthermore, a node-based rescaling strategy is introduced to align the inference phase graphs to the training ones. Experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate that DKM-GA achieves superior performance, reducing estimation errors by up to 12.66%. Moreover, our analysis identifies three practical scenarios where the model delivers greater performance gains, even achieving 19.51% improvements on datasets that show minor gains under standard settings. These results highlight the effectiveness and potential of our model, while the scenarios provide settings for more comprehensive evaluations in terms of performance and robustness.