Attention based Graph Covolution Networks for Intelligent Traffic Flow Analysis

Abstract

Predicting traffic flow is one of the fundamental issue to smart cities. However it is still challenging in vehicular cyber-physical systems because of ever-increasing urban traffic data. Most previous models for traffic flow prediction suffers the problem with variance error depends on time and location. In this paper, a novel graph convolution network (GCN) approach is proposed for predicting citywide traffic flow. Our key idea is to introduce spatial and temporal attention to the GCN model to lessen the impact of urban data complexity. A framework of flow-based graph convolutional network is established to improve traffic flow prediction while investigating the spatial and temporal correlation of traffic flow. We further propose practical strategies that efficiently learn parameters of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach to traffic flow prediction outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.