CAN-ST: Clustering Adaptive Normalization for Spatio-temporal OOD Learning

CAN-ST: Clustering Adaptive Normalization for Spatio-temporal OOD Learning

Min Yang, Yang An, Jinliang Deng, Xiaoyu Li, Bin Xu, Ji Zhong, Xiankai Lu, Yongshun Gong

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3543-3551. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/394

Spatio-temporal data mining is crucial for decision-making and planning in diverse domains. However, in real-world scenarios, training and testing data are often not independent or identically distributed due to rapid changes in data distributions over time and space, resulting in spatio-temporal out-of-distribution (OOD) challenges. This non-stationarity complicates accurate predictions and has motivated research efforts focused on mitigating non-stationarity through normalization operations. Existing methods, nonetheless, often address individual time series in isolation, neglecting correlations across series, which limits their capacity to handle complex spatio-temporal dynamics and results in suboptimal solutions. To overcome these challenges, we propose Clustering Adaptive Normalization (CAN-ST), a general and model-agnostic method that mitigates non-stationarity by capturing both localized distributional changes and shared patterns across nodes via adaptive clustering and a parameter register. As a plugin, CAN-ST can be easily integrated into various spatio-temporal prediction models. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets with diverse forecasting models demonstrate that CAN-ST consistently improves performance by over 20% on average and outperforms state-of-the-art normalization methods.
Keywords:
Data Mining: DM: Mining spatial and/or temporal data
Data Mining: DM: Applications
Data Mining: DM: Mining data streams