Enhancing traffic flow prediction: Dual-branch graph convolutional network with rough data inference and adaptive spatial dependencies

Abstract

Traffic flow prediction is a significant application of deep learning in spatio-temporal forecasting analysis. Existing research faces challenges that hinder prediction accuracy. One challenge is the inadequate capturing of spatial dependencies in traffic flow due to fixed pre-defined graph structures. Moreover, manually designed prior graphs still have limitations in extracting spatial features. Another challenge is the instability in short-term prediction performance when pre-defined graphs are completely abandoned in favor of parameter training. Additionally, ordinary RNN sequence convolution methods also struggle to capture long-term sequential patterns in large historical traffic data, leading to gradient vanishing or exploding issues. To address these challenges, we proposes a graph convolutional network for traffic flow prediction. We combine an improved prior graph with an adaptive graph to form a dual-branch spatio-temporal neural network. In the first branch, we introduce a time graph based on rough data inference to complement the predefined static graph. In the second branch, we construct an adaptive learning framework that dynamically learns the adjacency matrix and captures global road information. By utilizing enhanced multi-scale gated convolution, we extract spatio-temporal dependencies. Our method surpasses most baseline approaches according to extensive experiments conducted on public datasets.