Accurate Traffic Prediction Research Articles

TEA-GCN: Transformer-Enhanced Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Traffic flow forecasting is crucial for improving urban traffic management and reducing resource consumption. Accurate traffic conditions prediction requires capturing the complex spatial-temporal dependencies inherent in traffic data. Traditional spatial-temporal graph modeling methods often rely on fixed road network structures, failing to account for the dynamic spatial correlations that vary over time. To address this, we propose a Transformer-Enhanced Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network (TEA-GCN) that alternately learns temporal and spatial correlations in traffic data layer-by-layer. Specifically, we design an adaptive graph convolutional module to dynamically capture implicit road dependencies at different time levels and a local-global temporal attention module to simultaneously capture long-term and short-term temporal dependencies. Experimental results on two public traffic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model compared to other state-of-the-art traffic flow prediction methods.

An Adaptive Framework for Traffic Congestion Prediction using Deep Learning

Aim and background: Congestion on China's roads has worsened in recent years due to the country's rapid economic development, rising urban population, rising private car ownership, inequitable traffic flow distribution, and growing local congestion. As cities expand, traffic congestion has become an unavoidable nuisance that endangers the safety and progress of its residents. Improving the utilization rate of municipal transportation facilities and relieving traffic congestion depend on a thorough and accurate identification of the current state of road traffic and necessitate anticipating road congestion in the city. Methodology: In this research, we suggest using a deep spatial and temporal graph convolutional network (DSGCN) to forecast the current state of traffic congestion. To begin, we grid out the transportation system to create individual regions for analysis. In this work, we abstract the grid region centers as nodes, and we use an adjacency matrix to signify the dynamic correlations between the nodes. Results and Discussion: The spatial correlation between regions is then captured utilizing a Graph Convolutional-Neural-Network (GCNN), while the temporal correlation is captured using a two-layer long and short-term feature model (DSTM). Conclusion: Finally, testing on real PeMS datasets shows that the DSGCN has superior performance than other baseline models and provides more accurate traffic congestion prediction.

MSSTGNN: Multi-Scaled Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for short- and long-term traffic prediction

Accurate traffic prediction plays a crucial role in ensuring traffic safety and minimizing property damage. The utilization of STGNNs in traffic prediction has gained significant attention from researchers aiming to capture the intricate time-varying relationships within traffic data. While existing STGNNs commonly rely on Euclidean distance to assess the similarity between nodes, which may fall short in reflecting POI or regional functions. The traffic network exhibits static from a macro perspective, whereas undergoes dynamic changes in the micro perspective. Previous researchers incorporating self-attention to capture time-varying features for constructing dynamic graphs have faced challenges in overlooking the connections between nodes due to the Softmax polarization effect, which tends to amplify extreme value differences, and fails to accurately represent the true relationships between nodes. To solve this problem, we introduce the Multi-Scaled Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (MSSTGNN), which aims to comprehensively capture characteristics within traffic from multiscale viewpoints to construct multi-perspective graphs. We employ a trainable matrix to enhance the predefined adjacency matrices and to construct an optimal dynamic graph based on both trend and period. Additionally, a graph aggregate technique is proposed to effectively merge trend and periodic dynamic graphs. TCN is developed to model nonstationary traffic data, and we leverage the skip and residual connections to increase the model depth. A two-stage learning approach and a novel MSELoss function is designed to enhance the model's performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the MSSTGNN model outperforms the existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performances across multiple real-world datasets.

MSA-GCN: Multistage Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Flow Prediction

Timely and accurate traffic flow prediction is crucial for stabilizing road conditions, reducing environmental pollution, and mitigating economic losses. While current graph convolution methods have achieved certain results, they do not fully leverage the true advantages of graph convolution. There is still room for improvement in simultaneously addressing multi-graph convolution, optimizing graphs, and simulating road conditions. Based on this, this paper proposes MSA-GCN: Multistage Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Flow Prediction. This method overcomes the aforementioned issues by dividing the process into different stages and achieves promising prediction results. In the first stage, we construct a latent similarity adjacency matrix and address the randomness interference features in similarity features through two optimizations using the proposed ConvGRU Attention Layer (CGAL module) and the Causal Similarity Capture Module (CSC module), which includes Granger causality tests. In the second stage, we mine the potential correlation between roads using the Correlation Completion Module (CC module) to create a global correlation adjacency matrix as a complement for potential correlations. In the third stage, we utilize the proposed Auto-LRU autoencoder to pre-train various weather features, encoding them into the model’s prediction process to enhance its ability to simulate the real world and improve interpretability. Finally, in the fourth stage, we fuse these features and use a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) to model time dependencies, outputting the prediction results through a linear layer. Our model demonstrates a performance improvement of 29.33%, 27.03%, and 23.07% on three real-world datasets (PEMSD8, LOSLOOP, and SZAREA) compared to advanced baseline methods, and various ablation experiments validate the effectiveness of each stage and module.

Spatial–Temporal-Correlation-Constrained Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Accurate traffic flow prediction in road networks is essential for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Since traffic data are collected from the road network with spatial topological and time series sequences, the traffic flow prediction is regarded as a spatial–temporal prediction task. With the powerful ability to model the non-Euclidean data, the graph convolutional network (GCN)-based models have become the mainstream framework for traffic forecasting. However, existing GCN-based models either use the manually predefined graph structure to capture the spatial features, ignoring the heterogeneity of road networks, or simply perform 1-D convolution with fixed kernel to capture the temporal dependencies of traffic data, resulting in insufficient long-term temporal feature extraction. To solve those issues, a spatial–temporal correlation constrained dynamic graph convolutional network (STC-DGCN) is proposed for traffic flow forecasting. In STC-DGCN, a spatial–temporal embedding encoder module (STEM) is first constructed to encode the dynamic spatial relationships for road networks at different time steps. Then, a temporal feature encoder module with heterogeneous time series correlation modeling (TFE-HCM) and a spatial feature encoder module with dynamic multi-graph modeling (SFE-DCM) are designed to generate dynamic graph structures for effectively capturing the dynamic spatial and temporal correlations. Finally, a spatial–temporal feature fusion module based on a gating fusion mechanism (STM-GM) is proposed to effectively learn and leverage the inherent spatial–temporal relationships for traffic flow forecasting. Experimental results from three real-world traffic flow datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed STC-DGCN compared with state-of-the-art traffic flow forecasting models.

Road network traffic flow prediction: A personalized federated learning method based on client reputation

Accurate traffic flow prediction can provide effective decision-making support for traffic management, alleviate traffic congestion, and improve road traffic efficiency. Traffic flow data contains personal privacy information, such as vehicle trajectories, driving speed, etc. However, most existing research focuses on using all local data to jointly construct prediction models, facing data security and privacy issues. In response to these challenges, this paper presents a Personalized Federated Learning method based on Client Reputation for traffic flow prediction. This method avoids direct sharing of original data by performing model training and information aggregation locally, thereby better protecting user privacy. We initially constructed the foundational model by integrating Graph Neural Networks (GCNs) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) for federated learning. GCNs are capable of capturing the spatial relationships between nodes in a road network, thereby extracting the spatial features of traffic flow. On the other hand, GRUs has advantages at handling sequential data, effectively capturing the dynamic temporal characteristics of traffic flow. Consequently, by combining GCNs and GRUs, we are able to build a model that captures both the spatial and temporal features of traffic flow. Subsequently, we employed a federated learning framework to train the model. In the training process, we propose two evaluation algorithms to evaluate the reputation of all clients participating in federated learning. Then, different weights are customized for each client through a personalized algorithm based on the client's reputation to improve its personalization. Finally, we validated the method on the License Plate Recognition (LPR) datasets collected in Changsha city, China. The experimental results indicate that the method can achieve good prediction performance and stability while protecting the privacy of all participants.

Analysing Urban Traffic Patterns with Neural Networks and COVID-19 Response Data

Accurate traffic prediction is crucial for urban planning, especially in rapidly growing cities. Traditional models often struggle to account for sudden traffic pattern changes, such as those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Neural networks offer a powerful solution, capturing complex, non-linear relationships in traffic data for more precise prediction. This study aims to create a neural network model for predicting vehicle numbers at main intersections in the city. The model is created using real data from the sensors placed across the city of Zilina, Slovakia. By integrating pandemic-related variables, the model assesses the COVID-19 impact on traffic flow. The model was developed using neural networks, following the data-mining methodology CRISP-DM. Before the modelling, the data underwent thorough preparation, emphasising correcting sensor errors caused by communication failures. The model demonstrated high prediction accuracy, with correlations between predicted and actual values ranging from 0.70 to 0.95 for individual sensors and vehicle types. The results highlighted a significant pandemic impact on urban mobility. The model’s adaptability allows for easy retraining for different conditions or cities, making it a robust, adaptable tool for future urban planning and traffic management. It offers valuable insights into pandemic-induced traffic changes and can enhance post-pandemic urban mobility analysis.

Generative spatiotemporal image exploitation for datacenter traffic prediction

The tremendous growth rate of global internet traffic in past years increases the importance of traffic prediction for network operators to ensure seamless Quality of Service (QoS) with proactive traffic engineering. Even minor anomalies in traffic management can lead to service disruptions that affect a vast user base, necessitating highly accurate traffic predictions. While recent studies have exploited Deep Learning for accurate traffic predictions, most of them have targeted mobile network traffic and they often fall short in delivering precise long-range predictions and effective spatiotemporal feature extraction from single-stream time-series data. This research addresses these limitations by proposing a Convolutional Recurrent Generative Adversarial Network (CoRe-GAN) consisting of generator and discriminator neural networks for high-accuracy traffic prediction. The generator with Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) model effectively captures intricate features, whereas the discriminator utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to train the generator through feedback. Moreover, advanced training techniques like fact forcing and feature matching increase the learning convergence rate, avoid mode collapse, and amplify prediction accuracy of CoRe-GAN. The evaluation with Pangyo Network Dataset (PND) and synthetic Intrusion Detection Dataset (IDD) confirms CoRe-GAN superiority. The results show that it outperforms ConvLSTM models with an average 20% and 16% lower Mean Square Error (MSE) with PND and IDD traffic data, respectively.

Koopman theory meets graph convolutional network: Learning the complex dynamics of non-stationary highway traffic flow for spatiotemporal prediction

Reliable and accurate traffic flow prediction is crucial for the construction and operation of smart highways, supporting scientific traffic management and planning. However, accurately predicting spatiotemporal traffic flow in non-stationary and unprecedented traffic patterns scenarios, such as holidays and adverse weather conditions, remains a challenging task. Considering that (1) Koopman theory effectively captures the underlying time-variant dynamics of the non-stationary temporal sequence (2) Graph convolutional network (GCN) effectively extracts complex spatial dependencies, combining the strengths of both is a promising solution. Therefore, this paper proposes a spatiotemporal prediction network that integrates Koopman theory and GCN, named KoopGCN, for predicting non-stationary and inexperienced highway traffic flow. KoopGCN decomposes the input into time-invariant and time-variant components based on Fast Fourier Transform. The dual engine block consisting of KoopGCN InvarEngine and KoopGCN VarEngine is designed to predict two types of components separately. And the dual engine block also passes the residual to the next block for modeling. The experiment is conducted on real monitored highway data in Ningde City, Fujian Province, China. The results indicate that even if there is a significant distribution difference between the training and testing sets, KoopGCN can achieve accurate prediction, significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Transfer learning-based nonstationary traffic flow prediction using AdaRNN and DCORAL

Traffic flow prediction is an integral part of an intelligent transportation system (ITS) for proactive transportation planning and management in public transit network systems. However, due to the influence of passengers’ travel modes and the difficulty of data collection, some traffic flow datasets are not only nonstationary in temporal distribution but also insufficient in data size, leading to inaccurate prediction results. Therefore, a transfer learning-based method is proposed to predict nonstationary traffic flow with inadequate data in the public transit system. In the proposed model, a novel approach named AdaRNN-DCORAL is presented to achieve accurate traffic flow prediction in the temporal dimension. Specifically, AdaRNN is an adaptive prediction network for nonstationary traffic flow data, while DCORAL performs domain adaptation between the source and target domain in the public transit system. First, two domains of traffic flow datasets in two public transit modes are established, which are the target domain with insufficient data and the source domain with sufficient data. Subsequently, the traffic flow datasets are divided into weekday and holiday time series based on their distribution characteristics. On this basis, AdaRNN-DCORAL is trained on the constructed datasets, thus achieving the precise nonstationary prediction of data scarcity in the target domain. Finally, the experiments demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed method over that of state-of-the-art models in terms of prediction accuracy and computation time.

A traffic-weather generative adversarial network for traffic flow prediction for road networks under bad weather

Traffic flow prediction is pivotal in providing reliable information for intelligent traffic systems. Unexpected events, such as bad weather, unavoidably impact the precision of traffic flow prediction. Therefore, to achieve accurate traffic flow prediction results in road networks under bad weather, a novel Traffic-Weather Generative Adversarial Network (TWeather-GAN model) is developed. This model comprises a Generator and a Discriminator. The Generator incorporates both the traffic and weather modules to extract the spatiotemporal patterns hidden in traffic flow and weather data. In the traffic and weather modules, the gated convolutional layer, Encoder-Decoder architecture, and attention mechanism are established. In the Discriminator, the gated convolutional layer and bidirectional long short-term memory neural network are introduced. Traffic flow data under fog, strong wind, and heavy rain are selected to test the seven baseline models and the proposed model, and the ablation experiments are conducted to analyze the mechanism of the proposed model. The experiments demonstrate that the TWeather-GAN model outperforms the baseline models under bad weather, and makes the prediction error have an average reduction of 0.20%–34.81%, 3.21%–35.22%, and 9.46%–39.10%, respectively, under one-step prediction, three-step prediction, and six-step prediction. Furthermore, establishing the gated convolutional layer and the weather module enhances the accuracy of traffic flow prediction under bad weather. Results show that traffic flow fluctuations and distributions differ under fog and strong wind, and heavy rain affects the trend of traffic flow over one day.

ST-TDCN: A two-channel tree-structure spatial–temporal convolutional network model for traffic velocity prediction

In the development of intelligent transport systems which aims to provide safe, convenient, and comfortable transport and effectively addresses issues with traffic congestion and pollution, accurate collection of spatial–temporal data is of great significance. Based on the study of the topology and spatial characteristics of the transportation network, data with spatial–temporal attributed can be predicted by relevant models. Thus, the purpose of providing additional information for decision making and labor cost saving is achieved. This study proposed a more accurate traffic velocity prediction model, named Spatial-Temporal Tree-structure Dual-channel Convolution Network. The model designs a spatial tree convolution module for capturing the spatial features of nodes in the traffic network represented by the tree structure and applies a dual-channel temporal convolutional network module to capture the temporal information of velocity data more accurately. Comparative tests have demonstrated that the model proposed in this study has the advantages of higher accuracy, better convergence and more flexibility in responding to dynamic changes of traffic velocity.

DDGformer: Direction- and distance-aware graph transformer for traffic flow prediction

Being an indispensable core technology of intelligent transportation systems, accurate traffic flow prediction contributes to improving people’s travel efficiency and safety. How to accurately model the dynamic spatio-temporal correlation in traffic data is a key challenge in traffic flow prediction. The models based on self-attention and Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have shown great potential in addressing this challenge. However, existing methods ignore the relative distance and direction of traffic flow series, and cannot accurately capture the real dynamic spatio-temporal correlations in traffic systems. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel framework called Direction- and Distance-aware Graph Transformer (DDGformer). Specifically, it utilizes a self-attention module that simultaneously perceives direction and distance, enabling it to identify the relative position and direction of the original traffic flow series, and models long-term temporal correlations. Additionally, a dynamically enhanced adaptive graph convolution network is designed to capture dynamic traffic patterns in traffic systems. Extensive experimental results on four real-world traffic datasets show that our approach is overall more competitive and exhibits outstanding computational efficiency.

Graph Attention Informer for Long-Term Traffic Flow Prediction under the Impact of Sports Events.

Traffic flow prediction is one of the challenges in the development of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Accurate traffic flow prediction helps to alleviate urban traffic congestion and improve urban traffic efficiency, which is crucial for promoting the synergistic development of smart transportation and smart cities. With the development of deep learning, many deep neural networks have been proposed to address this problem. However, due to the complexity of traffic maps and external factors, such as sports events, these models cannot perform well in long-term prediction. In order to enhance the accuracy and robustness of the model on long-term time series prediction, a Graph Attention Informer (GAT-Informer) structure is proposed by combining the graph attention layer and informer layer to capture the intrinsic features and external factors in spatial-temporal correlation. The external factors are represented as sports events impact factors. The GAT-Informer model was tested on real-world data collected in London, and the experimental results showed that our model has better performance in long-term traffic flow prediction compared to other baseline models.

STFGCN: Spatial–temporal fusion graph convolutional network for traffic prediction

Accurate traffic prediction plays a crucial role in improving traffic conditions and optimizing road utilization. Effectively capturing the multi-scale temporal dependencies and dynamic spatial dependencies is crucial for accurate traffic prediction. These features can effectively reflect complex dynamic spatial–temporal processes, which have not been comprehensively addressed in most existing research work. Motivated by this issue, the primary contribution of this paper lies in proposing a novel Spatial–Temporal Fusion Graph Neural Network (STFGCN) for accurate traffic prediction, achieved by extracting multi-scale temporal dependencies from multiple semantic environments and constructing a dynamic adaptive graph to model spatial dependencies based on temporal characteristics. Specifically, to capture the multi-scale dynamic temporal dependencies effectively, a Multi-Scale Fusion Convolution (MSFC) module is designed, in which the temporal dependencies are extracted from multiple textual environments by utilizing multi-scale convolution. In order to model dynamic spatial dependencies, a Spatial Adaptive Fusion Convolution (SAFC) module is designed by combining the recent coherence and periodicity to infer dynamic graphs, which are then fused to model dynamic spatial dependencies. Extensive experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed STFGCN has superior performance. Specifically, compared with the state-of-the-art baselines, STFGCN reduced 1.2% to 16.4% in RMSE measure.

Traffic crash prediction in Kano, Nigeria: multivariate long short-term memory method

Accurate traffic crash prediction is crucial for implementing effective road safety measures. In this study, the performance of long short-term memory (LSTM) and multivariate LSTM (MLSTM) models in forecasting total crash count data in Kano state, Nigeria were compared. Human and vehicle factors, including speed violations, tyre bursts, brake failures, sign/light violations and phone use while driving, were incorporated as covariates in the MLSTM model. An autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous variables (Arimax) model was used to investigate the effects of the covariates. The MLSTM model outperformed both the basic LSTM model and individual covariate models, emphasising the synergistic effect of considering a broad range of factors. The Arimax model results revealed that speed violation is significantly positively correlated with total crashes; the other covariates showed positive correlations but did not reach the statistical significance. The findings underscore the importance of a multivariate approach in enhancing traffic crash prediction. The MLSTM model's superior performance highlights the value of considering a comprehensive range of factors that influence crash occurrence to achieve more accurate predictions. Practical applications of these models could involve leveraging them for proactive traffic safety measures, including increased enforcement of traffic rules, improvements to road infrastructure and targeted driver education and campaigns.

Interactive dynamic diffusion graph convolutional network for traffic flow prediction

Capturing the temporal and spatial features, and the spatiotemporal correlations in traffic networks is the essential task for accurate traffic flow prediction. Although most existing models have explored the temporal features deeply, the periodicity and dynamics of diffusion signals in spatial features are neglected. Besides, most previous methods cannot capture the heterogeneous spatiotemporal correlations of traffic sequences. In order to tackle the above two issues, a novel deep learning-based model called interactive dynamic diffusion graph convolutional network is proposed to realize accurate traffic flow prediction. Firstly, a new periodic and dynamic diffusion graph convolutional network is proposed to extract the periodicity and dynamics of diffusion signals in spatial features. Secondly, a new spatiotemporal interactive dynamic graph generator is proposed to generate a spatiotemporal dynamic graph through a spatiotemporal interactive operation, and it can comprehensively capture the heterogeneous spatiotemporal correlations of traffic sequences. Finally, the proposed model attains an accurate traffic flow prediction through extensive experiments on two real-world traffic flow datasets, which confirm the superiority of the proposed model compared with twelve baseline models.

Research on the Fiber-to-the-Room Network Traffic Prediction Method Based on Crested Porcupine Optimizer Optimization

In order to solve the problem of traffic burst due to the increase in access points and user movement in an FTTR network, as well as to meet the demand for a high-performance network, it is necessary to rationally allocate network resources, and accurate traffic prediction is very important for dynamic bandwidth allocation in such a network. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel traffic prediction model, named CPO-BiTCN-BiLSTM-SA, which integrates the Crested Porcupine Optimizer (CPO), bidirectional temporal convolution (BiTCN), and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) networks. BiTCN extends the traditional TCN by incorporating bidirectional data information, while BiLSTM enhances the network’s capability to learn from long sequences. Moreover, self-attention (SA) mechanisms are utilized to emphasize the crucial segments in the data. Subsequently, the BiTCN-BiLSTM-SA model is optimized by CPO to obtain the best network hyperparameters, and model training prediction is performed to achieve multi-step predictions based on single-step prediction. To evaluate the model’s generalization ability, two distinct datasets are employed for traffic prediction. Experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed model surpasses existing models in terms of the root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and coefficient of determination (R2). In comparison with the traditional XGBoost model, the proposed model has an average reduction of 29.50%, 25.43%, and 25.00% in RMSE, MAE, and MAPE, respectively, with a 6.70% improvement in R2.

STBGRN: A Traffic Prediction Model Based on Spatiotemporal Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units and Graph Convolutional Residual Networks

With the development of society and the advancement of urbanization, the development of intelligent transportation system has attracted much attention. Efficient and accurate traffic flow prediction is one of the core tasks in the research of intelligent transportation system. Most of the existing spatiotemporal traffic flow prediction models do not make full use of various periodic spatiotemporal dynamic characteristics of traffic flow, and it is difficult to effectively capture the complex spatiotemporal changes of traffic flow. To accurately predict the traffic flow of complex urban network, this paper proposes a traffic prediction model (STBGRN) based on spatiotemporal bidirectional gated cycle unit (ST-BiGRU) and graph convolution residual network (GCN-ResNet). The spatiotemporal information in traffic data is learned using the spatiotemporal bidirectional GRU coupled with the forward and backward information of the current time step, and the topology structure of the traffic network is captured by the graph convolution residual network, which is combined to complete the prediction task of the urban traffic network. In this paper, STBGRN was tested on two real data sets, SZ-taxi and Los-loop, and compared with other baseline methods, the RMSE index reached 3.857 and 5.461, and the MAE index reached 2.702 and 3.781, respectively. Accuracy index is 72.66% and 91.35%, R2\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$${R}^{2}$$\\end{document} index is 0.858 and 0.845, var index is 0.858 and 0.849. The experimental results show that STBGRN model can obtain spatiotemporal dependence from complex traffic data, and can be used in spatiotemporal traffic data processing.

Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network with Transformer and Whale Optimization Algorithm for Traffic Flow Prediction

Accurate traffic flow prediction plays a crucial role in the development of intelligent traffic management. Despite numerous investigations into spatio-temporal methods, achieving high accuracy in traffic flow prediction remains challenging. This challenge arises from the complex dynamic spatio-temporal correlations within the traffic road network and the limitations imposed by the selection of hyperparameters based on experiments and manual experience, which can affect the performance of the network architecture. This paper introduces a novel transformer-based adaptive graph convolutional recurrent network. The proposed network automatically infers the interdependencies among different traffic sequences and incorporates the capability to capture global spatio-temporal correlations. This enables the dynamic capture of long-range temporal correlations. Furthermore, the whale optimization algorithm is employed to efficiently design an optimal network structure that aligns with the requirements of the traffic domain and maximizes the utilization of limited computational resources. This design approach significantly enhances the model’s performance and improves the accuracy of traffic flow prediction. The experimental results on four real datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. In PEMS03, it improves MAE by 2.6% and RMSE by 1.4%. In PEMS04, improvements are 1.6% in MAE and 1.4% in RMSE, with a similar MAPE score to the best baseline. For PEMS07, our approach shows a 4.1% improvement in MAE and 2.2% in RMSE. On PEMS08, it surpasses the current best baseline with a 3.4% improvement in MAE and 1.6% in RMSE. These results confirm the good performance of our model in traffic flow prediction across multiple datasets.