Traffic forecasting with graph spatial–temporal position recurrent network

Abstract

With the development of social economy and smart technology, the explosive growth of vehicles has caused traffic forecasting to become a daunting challenge, especially for smart cities. Recent methods exploit graph spatial–temporal characteristics, including constructing the shared patterns of traffic data, and modeling the topological space of traffic data. However, existing methods fail to consider the spatial position information and only utilize little spatial neighborhood information. To tackle above limitation, we design a Graph Spatial–Temporal Position Recurrent Network (GSTPRN) architecture for traffic forecasting. We first construct a position graph convolution module based on self-attention and calculate the dependence strengths among the nodes to capture the spatial dependence relationship. Next, we develop approximate personalized propagation that extends the propagation range of spatial dimension information to obtain more spatial neighborhood information. Finally, we systematically integrate the position graph convolution, approximate personalized propagation and adaptive graph learning into a recurrent network (i.e. Gated Recurrent Units). Experimental evaluation on two benchmark traffic datasets demonstrates that GSTPRN is superior to the state-of-art methods.