Graph learning-based spatial-temporal graph convolutional neural networks for traffic forecasting

Abstract

Traffic forecasting is highly challenging due to its complex spatial and temporal dependencies in the traffic network. Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN) has been effectively used for traffic forecasting due to its excellent performance in modelling spatial dependencies. In most existing approaches, GCN models spatial dependencies in the traffic network with a fixed adjacency matrix. However, the spatial dependencies change over time in the actual situation. In this paper, we propose a graph learning-based spatial-temporal graph convolutional neural network (GLSTGCN) for traffic forecasting. To capture the dynamic spatial dependencies, we design a graph learning module to learn the dynamic spatial relationships in the traffic network. To save training time and computation resources, we adopt dilated causal convolution networks with a gating mechanism to capture long-term temporal correlations in traffic data. We conducted extensive experiments using two real-world traffic datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GLSTGCN achieves superior performance than all state-of-art baselines.