SAX-STGCN: Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Flow Prediction

Abstract

Accurate, timely, and reliable traffic flow prediction is essential for an intelligent transportation system due to the complex spatio-temporal correlation of traffic flow. The prediction model based on graph convolution neural network (GCN) has become mainstream in recent years. However, most of the prediction models based on GCN only use an adjacency matrix to characterize the spatial correlation of traffic flow, ignoring the complex and dynamic relationship between road network adjacent nodes and missing the hidden connection between the global nodes of the road network. This paper proposes a SAX-STGCN network for traffic flow prediction to solve the above problems. The SAX-STGCN model uses symbolic approximation (sax) to obtain the similarity of the historical data of the predicted node in the previous period, including adjacent nodes and non-adjacent nodes, forming a similarity matrix to replace the original adjacency matrix composed of 0 and 1, which is defined as a global sax-correlation matrix to characterize the correlation between nodes in the road network and capture the implicit spatial relationships in the road network. Then, based on the dynamic global sax-correlation matrix, GCN is used to capture the spatial correlation of traffic flow, and GRU is used to capture the temporal correlation of traffic flow. The prediction accuracy is better than the baseline and has long-term prediction ability.