Urban Traffic Flow Prediction with Deep Neural Network

Abstract

It is critical to realize accurate collecting, visualization, rule mining, and prediction analysis of the traffic flow operating state in order for the intelligent transportation system to achieve exact management and control of traffic flow. Traffic flow prediction is primarily concerned with traffic data on roadways, which has both temporal and spatial correlations. Aiming at the spatiotemporal characteristics, this paper studies two aspects and designs a traffic flow prediction model with a deep neural network. First, this work proposes a traffic flow spatial feature learning algorithm with the combination of graph convolutional neural network and attention mechanism. Distinct weights are assigned to the degree of mutual impact between different nodes, and node adaptive learning is implemented at the same time, which modifies the standard parameter sharing mode, allowing for improved expressive ability and spatial feature extraction. Secondly, a learning algorithm for temporal characteristics of traffic flow based on the temporal convolutional network is proposed, which ensures that the dimensions of input and output data are consistent through causal convolution. The dilated convolution can flexibly control the receptive field by setting the sampling interval and can also extract temporal features well for long-length spatiotemporal sequence data. Finally, a spatiotemporal graph attention-based traffic flow prediction approach is constructed. To learn features, learn parameters for multiple modes and improve the model effect, this model employs a combination of graph convolutional neural networks and an attention mechanism. It uses a temporal convolutional network to expand the receptive field, better capture temporal features, and finally add residual connections to prevent problems such as overfitting caused by too deep network layers.