Spatial–temporal dependence and similarity aware traffic flow forecasting

Accurate traffic flow forecasting is crucial to the development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Based on statistical learning theory, support vector machine (SVM) has better generalization performance and can guarantee global minima for given training data. However, the good generalization performance of SVM highly depends on the construction of kernel function. An effective multi-scale Marr wavelet kernel which we combine the wavelet theory with SVM is presented in this paper. The forecasting performance is evaluated by real-time traffic flow data of highway in Los Angeles, USA and a variety of experiments are carried out. Compared to wavelet kernel function and RBF kernel function, the multi-scale wavelet kernel function has much more precise forecasting rate and higher efficiency, especially for boundary approximation.

Traffic flow forecasting is crucial for effective urban planning and the development of intelligent transportation systems. However, accurately capturing the complex spatiotemporal dependencies in traffic flow data remains a significant challenge. Current approaches typically face two major limitations: (i) insufficient modeling of long-term historical traffic flow patterns, which hinders the capture of global trends and periodic behaviors; and (ii) inadequate consideration of spatial structures and temporal response heterogeneity, which limits the model’s representational capacity. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a novel forecasting framework named Spatiotemporal Memory Decoupled Transformer (STMDFormer). First, a spatiotemporal embedding module is designed to fuse topological node structures with multi-scale periodic information. Then, a spatial memory attention mechanism is introduced, incorporating a learnable historical memory bank and a biased adjacency matrix for dynamic modeling of long-term traffic flow patterns. Furthermore, a decoupled learning module is designed to separate spatial and temporal features through normalization techniques, while employing multi-head attention to better capture spatiotemporal heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that STMDFormer consistently outperforms various state-of-the-art baselines in forecasting accuracy, validating its effectiveness in dynamic spatiotemporal modeling.

Spatial–Temporal Similarity Fusion Graph Adversarial Convolutional Networks for traffic flow forecasting

To more effectively capture the periodic and dynamic changes in urban traffic flow and the spatiotemporal correlation of complex road networks, a new traffic flow prediction method, the Enhanced Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network Encoder-Decoder Model (ESGCN-EDM), is proposed. The model achieves a significant enhancement in prediction accuracy through the introduction of the attention-based Personalized-enhanced Fusion Graph Convolutional Network (aPFGCN) and the Temporal Convolutional Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (TCBiL) module. The aPFGCN module effectively reduces the dimensionality of features and decreases model complexity to obtain the final node feature representation by personalizing the adjustment of node influence coefficients and applying Fourier transform and inverse transform techniques. Additionally, by incorporating an attention mechanism, it enhances the model’s ability to focus on important information and effectively captures the spatial topological relationships within the traffic network. The TCBiL module integrates 1D convolution with BiLSTM to form a unified temporal feature extraction module. The 1D convolution is utilized to extract local features from the time series, while the BiLSTM captures long-term dependencies within the time series. This allows for simultaneous feature extraction and temporal modeling, thereby enhancing the model’s efficiency and performance, and strengthening its ability to model time series. In the encoder part of the ESGCN-EDM, the aPFGCN is combined with the TCBiL to handle the spatiotemporal coupling interactions of the road network. The decoder part then performs multi-step predictions based on spatiotemporal sequences using the TCBiL and CNN, generating high-dimensional representations. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world road traffic datasets demonstrate that the ESGCN-EDM model consistently outperforms other benchmark models in 1-hour, 30-minute, and 15-minute traffic flow predictions. Specifically, on the PeMSD8 dataset, the model achieves reductions in MAE, RMSE, and SMAPE by 7.9%, 2.1%, and 16.9%, respectively, compared to the AMRGCN model for 1-hour predictions. Similarly, on the PeMSD4 dataset, the model reduces MAE, RMSE, and MAPE by 1.8%, 1.1%, and 3.0%, respectively. These results validate the efficacy of the proposed model and its ability to significantly enhance the accuracy of traffic flow forecasting.

In recent years, the rapid development of global artificial intelligence technology has become an important force in promoting the accelerated development of science and technology, and industry. From finance, medical care, and education to intelligent manufacturing and smart cities, artificial intelligence technology is penetrating into all walks of life, bringing convenience to people's lives. Through traffic flow forecasting, people can better plan their own travel routes and reduce the risk of traffic congestion. Accurate traffic forecast information can help to improve people's travel efficiency and improve urban service level, which is the core technology in the construction of intelligent transportation systems. The task of traffic flow forecasting aims at forecasting the future traffic flow trend according to the historical data information in the traffic network. The key challenge is how to model the temporal and spatial dependence in traffic networks. In the time domain, traffic flow has obvious periodicity characteristics, especially based on the daily periodicity and weekly periodicity characteristics of human social laws. We use the time series Transformer with predefined periodicity information to extract time dependence. In the spatial domain, there are similar traffic patterns in some areas on the macro level and the relationship between adjacent road sections on the micro level. We use the graph convolutional network based on the geographical adjacency matrix and the graph convolutional network based on the sequence semantic similarity matrix to extract the micro and macro spatial dependence respectively. We combine the two deeply and design a traffic flow forecasting model based on a graph convolutional network and Transformer to extract the deep temporal-spatial correlation. Finally, we experiment on several real-world traffic data sets to verify the effectiveness of the model.

Traffic flow has the characteristics of complex spatial dependence and temporal dependence. Deep learning as a traffic flow prediction method can make full use of the temporal and spatial characteristics of traffic flow. In this paper, the road network is abstracted into a graph structure, the size of the graph structure is dynamically changed, and the graph convolutional neural network (GCN) and the long short term memory network (LSTM) are used to capture the temporal and spatial characteristics of traffic flow to solve the traffic flow prediction problem. Based on the data of vehicle speed in California bay area, the experiment is divided into three prediction scales. The effectiveness of the traffic flow prediction model is verified by experimental comparison.

Traffic flow forecasting is an essential task of an intelligent transportation system (ITS), closely related to intelligent transportation management and resource scheduling. Dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies in traffic data make traffic flow forecasting to be a challenging task. Most existing research cannot model dynamic spatial and temporal correlations to achieve well-forecasting performance. The multi-head self-attention mechanism is a valuable method to capture dynamic spatial-temporal correlations, and combining it with graph convolutional networks is a promising solution. Therefore, we propose a multi-head self-attention spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (MSASGCN) model. It can effectively capture local correlations and potential global correlations of spatial structures, can handle dynamic evolution of the road network, and, in the time dimension, can effectively capture dynamic temporal correlations. Experiments on two real datasets verify the stability of our proposed model, obtaining a better prediction performance than the baseline algorithms. The correlation metrics get significantly reduced compared with traditional time series prediction methods and deep learning methods without using graph neural networks, according to MAE and RMSE results. Compared with advanced traffic flow forecasting methods, our model also has a performance improvement and a more stable prediction performance. We also discuss some problems and challenges in traffic forecasting.

In metropolitan areas, common traffic issues include traffic congestion, traffic accidents, air pollution, and energy consumption occur. To resolve this issues, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been evolved by many researchers. One of the important sub-systems in the development of ITS is a Traffic Management System (TMS) which attempts to reduce a traffic congestion. In fact, TMS itself relies on the estimation of traffic flow, therefore providing such an accurate traffic flow prediction is needed. For this reason, we aim to provide an accurate traffic flow prediction to facilitate this system. In this works, a Supervised Deep Learning Based Traffic Flow Prediction (SDLTFP) was proposed which is a type of fully-connected deep neural network (FC-DNN). Timely prediction is also a major issue in guaranteeing reliable traffic flow prediction. However, training a deep network could be time-consuming, and overfitting is might be happening, especially when feeding small data into the deep architecture. The network is learned perfectly during the training, but in testing with the new data, it could fail to generalize the model. We adopt the Batch Normalization (BN) and Dropout techniques to help the network training. SGD and momentum are carried out to update the weight. We then take advantage of open data as historical traffic data which are then used to predict future traffic flow with the proposed method and model above. Experiments show that the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) for our traffic flow prediction is within 5 % using sample data and between 15% to 20% using out of the sample data. Training a deep network faster with BN and Dropout reduces the overfitting.

The ability to predict traffic flow over time for crowded areas during rush hours is increasingly important as it can help authorities make informed decisions for congestion mitigation or scheduling of infrastructure development in an area. However, a crucial challenge in traffic flow forecasting is the slow shifting in temporal peaks between daily and weekly cycles, resulting in the nonstationarity of the traffic flow signal and leading to difficulty in accurate forecasting. To address this challenge, we propose a slow shifting concerned machine learning method for traffic flow forecasting, which includes two parts. First, we take advantage of Empirical Mode Decomposition as the feature engineering to alleviate the nonstationarity of traffic flow data, yielding a series of stationary components. Second, due to the superiority of Long-Short-Term-Memory networks in capturing temporal features, an advanced traffic flow forecasting model is developed by taking the stationary components as inputs. Finally, we apply this method on a benchmark of real-world data and provide a comparison with other existing methods. Our proposed method outperforms the state-of-art results by 14.55% and 62.56% using the metrics of root mean squared error and mean absolute percentage error, respectively.

With the continuous development of smart cities, intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have ushered in many breakthroughs and upgrades. As a solid foundation for an ITS, traffic flow prediction effectively helps the city to better manage intricate traffic flow. However, existing traffic flow prediction methods such as temporal graph convolutional networks(T-GCNs) ignore the dissimilarities between lanes. Thus, they cannot provide more specific information regarding predictions such as dynamic changes in traffic flow direction and deeper lane relationships. With the upgrading of intersection sensors, more and more intersection lanes are equipped with intersection sensors to detect vehicle information all day long. These spatio-temporal data help researchers refine the focus of traffic prediction research down to the lane level. More accurate and detailed data mean that it is more difficult to mine the spatio-temporal correlations between data, and modeling heterogeneous data becomes more challenging. In order to deal with these problems, we propose a heterogeneous graph convolution model based on dynamic graph generation. The model consists of three components. The internal graph convolution network captures the real-time spatial dependency between lanes in terms of generated dynamic graphs. The external heterogeneous data fusion network comprehensively considers other parameters such as lane speed, lane occupancy, and weather conditions. The codec neural network utilizes a temporal attention mechanism to capture the deep temporal dependency. We test the performance of this model based on two real-world datasets, and extensive comparative experiments indicate that the proposed heterogeneous graph convolution model can improve the prediction accuracy.

Traffic flow prediction is an important function of intelligent transportation systems. Accurate prediction results facilitate traffic management to issue early congestion warnings so that drivers can avoid congested roads, thus directly reducing the average driving time of vehicles, which means less greenhouse gas emissions. However, traffic flow data has complex spatial and temporal correlations, which makes it challenging to predict traffic flow accurately. A Gated Recurrent Graph Convolutional Attention Network (GRGCAN) for traffic flow prediction is proposed to solve this problem. The model consists of three components with the same structure, each of which contains one temporal feature extractor and one spatial feature extractor. The temporal feature extractor first introduces a gated recurrent unit (GRU) and uses the hidden states of the GRU combined with an attention mechanism to adaptively assign weights to each time step. In the spatial feature extractor, a node attention mechanism is constructed to dynamically assigns weights to each sensor node, and it is fused with the graph convolution operation. In addition, a residual connection is introduced into the network to reduce the loss of features in the deep network. Experimental results of 1-h traffic flow prediction on two real-world datasets (PeMSD4 and PeMSD8) show that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the GRGCAN model is as low as 15.97% and 12.13%, and the prediction accuracy and computational efficiency are better than the baselines.

Traffic flow forecasting is the basis for the dynamic control and application of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), which is of great practical importance in reducing road congestion. Accurately predicting traffic flow remains a significant obstacle due to the intricate spatial and temporal dependencies associated with traffic movement. To capture the simultaneous dynamics of traffic flow’s spatiotemporal features, this paper suggests a novel Spatiotemporal Interactive Dynamic Synchronous Graph Convolution Network (STIDSG) for traffic flow forecasting, which is composed of the Interactive Dynamic Graph Convolution Network (IDGCN) and the Spatiotemporal Synchronous Graph Convolution Layer (STSGCL). IDGCN learns and shares features using an interactive learning strategy that is based on Dynamic Graph Convolution (DGCN). By incorporating DGCN into the interactive learning structure, it is possible to learn dynamic spatial features of traffic flow in an interactive manner while also capturing temporal dependencies. STSGCL effectively captures the intricate local and dynamic correlations of traffic flows by designing numerous Spatiotemporal Synchronization Graph Convolution Modules (STSGCM) for different time periods. The results of the experiment demonstrate that the STIDSG model suggested in this paper can proficiently extract the changing spatiotemporal features of the traffic flow and outperforms the commonly used baseline methods for prediction. The results of the experiment demonstrate that the STIDSG model suggested in this paper can proficiently extract the changing spatiotemporal features of the traffic flow and outperforms the commonly used baseline methods for prediction.

Accurate traffic flow prediction is crucial for improving transportation efficiency. To improve the accuracy of traffic flow prediction, we developed a traffic flow prediction framework—namely, traffic flow multicomponent network—that appropriately processes the noise, volatility, and nonlinearity in traffic flow data. This framework comprises three components: a factor selection component, traffic flow decomposition component, and traffic flow prediction component. The factor selection component considers the dynamic effects of weather‐related, environmental, and spatiotemporal factors on traffic flow; it then extracts and analyzes factors exhibiting strong correlations with traffic flow. The traffic flow decomposition component optimizes the parameters of variational mode decomposition on the basis of the envelope entropy by using the sparrow search algorithm; it then transforms traffic flow into multiple intrinsic mode functions to enable accurate traffic flow prediction. Finally, the traffic flow prediction component constructs dynamic feature matrices by using a bidirectional gated recurrent unit model to identify relationships within the data. Moreover, it uses an attention mechanism to assign different weights to different features on the basis of the importance of these features to traffic flow prediction, thereby enabling the efficient processing of a large volume of data. The performance of the proposed framework was examined in experiments conducted on large volumes of traffic flow data with different time granularities. The results indicated that the proposed framework achieved high prediction accuracy and stability for various time granularities, data samples, dataset sizes, and noise conditions. Moreover, it generally outperformed existing traffic flow prediction models under all experimental conditions.

Traffic flow forecasting is an important issue for the application of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). How to improve the traffic flow forecasting precision is a crucial problem. Traffic models in different time sections have great differences. The forecasting precision could be improved if the traffic flow forecasting models were built on different time sections respectively. Traffic flow forecasting usually is real-time and too many forecasting variables will reduce the real-time performance. So the selection of the most informative forecasting variable combination is significant. It can save computation cost and improve forecasting precision. In this paper, information bottleneck theory based on extended entropy is used to partition traffic flow of a day into different time sections. Corresponding to each time section, feature selection based on mutual information is generalized to regression problems and is used to select the most informative variable combination. Selected variables are input to support vector machines (SVM) for traffic flow forecasting. Bayesian inference is used to determine the kernel parameters of SVM. The efficiency of the method is illustrated through analyzing the traffic data of Jinan urban transportation.

Accurate traffic speed forecasting is a prerequisite for anticipating future traffic status and increasing the resilience of intelligent transportation systems. However, most studies ignore the involvement of context information ubiquitously distributed over the urban environment to boost speed prediction. The diversity and complexity of context information also hinder incorporating it into traffic forecasting. Therefore, this study proposes a multimodal context-based graph convolutional neural network (MCGCN) model to fuse context data into traffic speed prediction, including spatial and temporal contexts. The proposed model comprises three modules, ie (a) hierarchical spatial embedding to learn spatial representations by organizing spatial contexts from different dimensions, (b) multivariate temporal modeling to learn temporal representations by capturing dependencies of multivariate temporal contexts and (c) attention-based multimodal fusion to integrate traffic speed with the spatial and temporal context representations for multi-step speed prediction. We conduct extensive experiments in Singapore. Compared to the baseline model (spatial-temporal graph convolutional network, STGCN), our results demonstrate the importance of multimodal contexts with the mean-absolute-error improvement of 0.29 km/h, 0.45 km/h and 0.89 km/h in 30-min, 60-min and 120-min speed prediction, respectively. We also explore how different contexts affect traffic speed forecasting, providing references for stakeholders to understand the relationship between context information and transportation systems.