Leakage-Free Evaluation and Distribution-Robust Spatio-Temporal Graph Learning for Inductive Kriging

Abstract

Inductive kriging estimates values at unobserved locations from sparse sensor data, enabling continuous field reconstruction when dense deployment is impractical. However, common 2 x 2 and 2 x 3 evaluation protocols can leak spatial information through model selection and obscure true out-of-distribution (OOD) behavior. We propose a leakage-free 3 x 3 partition that separates training, validation, and testing in both space and time, so that model fitting, checkpoint selection, and final reporting are performed on distinct spatio-temporal domains. Under this stricter setting, we introduce DRIK (Distribution-Robust Inductive Kriging), a framework with three task-specific mechanisms: Spatial Continuity Regularization (SCR) perturbs coordinates to reduce dependence on one discretized graph; Masked Flow Disambiguation (MFD) prunes ambiguous propagation from zero-padded masked nodes; and Structural Domain Expansion (SDE) uses validation-node topology without labels to reduce train-inference structural mismatch. Experiments on six spatio-temporal datasets show that DRIK consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing MAE by up to 12.48% and achieving lower test-to-validation MAE ratios under leakage-free evaluation. These results indicate that robust inductive kriging requires both leakage-free evaluation and mechanisms that explicitly address the structural shifts introduced by unseen nodes.