Yunfei Guo
The proliferation of urban big data presents unprecedented opportunities for understanding cities, yet the analytical methods to harness this data are often fragmented and domain-specific. Existing predictive models in urban computing are typically highly specialized, creating analytical silos that inhibit knowledge transfer and are difficult to adapt across domains such as public safety, housing and transport. This paper confronts this critical gap by developing a generalizable, multimodal spatio-temporal deep learning framework engineered for both high predictive performance and interpretability, which is capable of mastering diverse urban prediction tasks without architectural modification. The hybrid architecture fuses a Multi-Head Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for spatial diffusion, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for temporal dynamics, and a learnable Gating Mechanism that weights the influence of spatial graph versus static external features. To validate this generalizability, the framework was tested on three distinct urban domains in London: crime forecasting, housing price estimation and transport network demand. The model outperformed traditional baselines (ARIMA, XGBoost) and state-of-the-art deep learning models (TabNet, TFT). Moreover, the framework moves beyond prediction to explanation by incorporating attention mechanisms and permutation feature importance analysis.