Dynamic Spatial Transformer WaveNet Network for Traffic Forecasting

Abstract

Traffic forecasting has emerged as an important task for developing intelligent transportation systems. Recent works focus on representing traffic as graph operation and using graph neural networks for spatial–temporal prediction. Most of the approaches assume a predefined graph structure based on node distances. However, spatial dependencies change over time in many scenarios of traffic flow. In this regard, this study takes an investigation capturing the spatial and temporal dependencies with no prior knowledge structure of traffic road networks. Specifically, we propose a multi-step prediction model named Dynamic Spatial Transformer WaveNet Network (DSTWN) to capture the dynamic conditions and directions of traffic flow in which a temporal convolution layer is adopted for the long time sequence and a spatial transformer layer is proposed to capture the dynamic spatial dependencies. Furthermore, we introduce a new traffic dataset, which is collected from the vehicle detection system in an urban area (UVDS). In particular, compared with existing benchmark traffic data, UVDS contains more complicated spatial information, which is similar to many real-world scenarios of traffic flow. Experiments on both benchmark traffic datasets indicate the promising results of DSTWN compared with state-of-the-art models in this research field.