LGTCN: A Spatial–Temporal Traffic Flow Prediction Model Based on Local–Global Feature Fusion Temporal Convolutional Network

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High-precision traffic flow prediction facilitates intelligent traffic control and refined management decisions. Previous research has built a variety of exquisite models with good prediction results. However, they ignore the reality that traffic flows can propagate backwards on road networks when modeling spatial relationships, as well as associations between distant nodes. In addition, more effective model components for modeling temporal relationships remain to be developed. To address the above challenges, we propose a local–global features fusion temporal convolutional network (LGTCN) for spatio-temporal traffic flow prediction, which incorporates a bidirectional graph convolutional network, probabilistic sparse self-attention, and a multichannel temporal convolutional network. To extract the bidirectional propagation relationship of traffic flow on the road network, we improve the traditional graph convolutional network so that information can be propagated in multiple directions. In addition, in spatial global dimensions, we propose probabilistic sparse self-attention to effectively perceive global data correlations and reduce the computational complexity caused by the finite perspective graph. Furthermore, we develop a multichannel temporal convolutional network. It not only retains the temporal learning capability of temporal convolutional networks, but also corresponds each channel to a node, and it realizes the interaction of node features through output interoperation. Extensive experiments on four open access benchmark traffic flow datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.