Dynamic attention aggregated missing spatial–temporal data imputation for traffic speed prediction

Abstract

Traffic speed forecasting is indispensable in Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS). The missing traffic speed due to sensors’ failure may hamper the accurate prediction of traffic speed. Different kinds of imputation techniques were employed to replace the missing values considering the spatial and temporal information. However, previous techniques did not consider the dynamic contribution of the neighboring nodes and failed to capture the complex properties of traffic speed data precisely. The architecture of the previous imputation models was infeasible in real-time applications in terms of scalability. Therefore, a novel machine learning-based imputation technique is proposed to generate the missing traffic speed using the spatial–temporal information and dynamic contribution of neighboring nodes. A new dataset considering the characteristics of the traffic speed data is generated from the existing dataset by exploiting the non-missing traffic speed of neighboring nodes. The newly formed dataset helps in the estimation of the dynamic contribution of the neighboring nodes using the linear regression algorithm. The non-missing speeds and estimated dynamic contribution of neighboring nodes assist in calculating the missing speeds of a node. Furthermore, a novel deep learning-based prediction model is introduced to forecast traffic speed accurately. The prediction model contains graph structure learning, a deep graph neural network with skip connections, GRU, multi-head soft attention, and a fully connected neural network. Graph structure learning is proposed based on the distribution of the congestion to represent the graph in an efficient way. The deep graph neural network with skip connections and GRU help in capturing topological and temporal information, respectively. The multi-head soft attention is designed to focus on every relevant temporal information at each time step for capturing global traffic information. Finally, the extracted spatial–temporal features are fed into the fully connected neural network to predict the traffic speed. The proposed imputation and prediction models are evaluated on two real-time datasets, METR-LA and PeMSD7 datasets, under different missing rates of different missing patterns. The proposed framework generates possible spatial–temporal information for efficient traffic congestion management and evicts erroneous issues in real-time.