Spatial-temporal Traffic Flow Prediction Model Based on the GAT and BiGRU

Abstract

Real-time and accurate traffic flow prediction is crucial for improving the safety, stability, and efficiency of intelligent transportation system. Considering that traffic flow prediction methods rarely analyze from the perspective of the road network, in this paper, a spatial-temporal traffic flow prediction model based on the combination of graph attention network (GAT) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) neural network is proposed. Firstly, GAT is used to analyze the complex topology of the road network, effectively obtaining the spatial features of the road network. Secondly, BiGRU is used to learn the dynamic changes of traffic flow data, effectively obtaining the temporal features. Thirdly, the obtained spatial-temporal features are output by the fully connected layer to complete the prediction of future traffic flow. Finally, the model is validated and evaluated on the California highway dataset. The experimental results show that the accuracy of GAT-BiGRU model is better than other benchmark models in predicting future traffic flows transformation, especially in long-term prediction.