HIT-GCN: Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network Embedded with Heterogeneous Information of Road Network for Traffic Forecasting

Abstract

In road networks, attribute information carried by road segment nodes, such as weather and points of interest (POI), exhibit strong heterogeneity and often involve one-to-many or many-to-one relationships. However, research on such heterogeneity in traffic prediction is relatively limited. Our research examines how varying the network propagation pattern based on the degree of node-to-node heterogeneity of information affects the model prediction performance. Specifically, at the node level, we use knowledge embedding to generate knowledge vectors that quantify the heterogeneity among the attribute information of a node. At the road network level, we calculate a homogeneity adjacency matrix that captures both the topological structure of the road network and the similarity of node heterogeneity. This adjacency matrix assigns different weights to neighbors based on their homogeneity, guiding the propagation of graph convolutional networks (GCN). Finally, we separate the representation of propagation into self-representation and neighbor representation to extract multi-attribute information, including self, homogeneity, and heterogeneity. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate that the incorporation of our homogeneity adjacency matrix leads to a significant improvement in the accuracy of short-term and long-term prediction compared with previous work on homogeneous and single-dimensional information. Furthermore, our approach maintains its performance advantage over baseline models under different embedding dimensions and parameter settings.