Deep Spatial-Temporal Network Based on Residual Networks and Dilated Convolution for Traffic Flow Prediction

Abstract

As modern cities become more intelligent, traffic flow forecasting is becoming increasingly significant in intelligent transport and urban governance. Accurate traffic forecasting can help the management and the residents to travel, and how to achieve accurate and efficient traffic forecasting is a problem that has been studied by many scholars. With the growth of artificial intelligence and the generation of large-scale traffic data, deep learning can be more effective than traditional probabilistic prediction models in traffic flow forecasting, but there are two more problems to be solved. Firstly, the use of too many levels of convolution often leads to over-fitting. Secondly, the state of traffic in a city can be impacted by external factors such as meteorological conditions, temperature, and wind speed. To solve this problem, we propose an end-to-end neural network model based on the residual network, dilated convolution, and call it STDCN. Convolution and dilated convolution are used in the model to obtain local spatial dependencies and distant spatial dependencies. We designed an external feature extractor to transform the external factors into a ID tensor using the One-Hot Encoding.