  Outstanding achievements of graph neural networks for spatiotemporal time
series analysis show that relational constraints introduce an effective
inductive bias into neural forecasting architectures. Often, however, the
relational information characterizing the underlying data-generating process is
unavailable and the practitioner is left with the problem of inferring from
data which relational graph to use in the subsequent processing stages. We
propose novel, principled - yet practical - probabilistic score-based methods
that learn the relational dependencies as distributions over graphs while
maximizing end-to-end the performance at task. The proposed graph learning
framework is based on consolidated variance reduction techniques for Monte
Carlo score-based gradient estimation, is theoretically grounded, and, as we
show, effective in practice. In this paper, we focus on the time series
forecasting problem and show that, by tailoring the gradient estimators to the
graph learning problem, we are able to achieve state-of-the-art performance
while controlling the sparsity of the learned graph and the computational
scalability. We empirically assess the effectiveness of the proposed method on
synthetic and real-world benchmarks, showing that the proposed solution can be
used as a stand-alone graph identification procedure as well as a graph
learning component of an end-to-end forecasting architecture.
