No Arabic abstract
As a crucial component in intelligent transportation systems, traffic flow prediction has recently attracted widespread research interest in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) with the increasing availability of massive traffic mobility data. Its key challenge lies in how to integrate diverse factors (such as temporal rules and spatial dependencies) to infer the evolution trend of traffic flow. To address this problem, we propose a unified neural network called Attentive Traffic Flow Machine (ATFM), which can effectively learn the spatial-temporal feature representations of traffic flow with an attention mechanism. In particular, our ATFM is composed of two progressive Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM cite{xingjian2015convolutional}) units connected with a convolutional layer. Specifically, the first ConvLSTM unit takes normal traffic flow features as input and generates a hidden state at each time-step, which is further fed into the connected convolutional layer for spatial attention map inference. The second ConvLSTM unit aims at learning the dynamic spatial-temporal representations from the attentionally weighted traffic flow features. Further, we develop two deep learning frameworks based on ATFM to predict citywide short-term/long-term traffic flow by adaptively incorporating the sequential and periodic data as well as other external influences. Extensive experiments on two standard benchmarks well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method for traffic flow prediction. Moreover, to verify the generalization of our method, we also apply the customized framework to forecast the passenger pickup/dropoff demands in traffic prediction and show its superior performance. Our code and data are available at {color{blue}url{https://github.com/liulingbo918/ATFM}}.
In an intelligent transportation system, the key problem of traffic forecasting is how to extract the periodic temporal dependencies and complex spatial correlation. Current state-of-the-art methods for traffic flow forecasting are based on graph architectures and sequence learning models, but they do not fully exploit spatial-temporal dynamic information in the traffic system. Specifically, the temporal dependence of the short-range is diluted by recurrent neural networks, and the existing sequence model ignores local spatial information because the convolution operation uses global average pooling. Besides, there will be some traffic accidents during the transitions of objects causing congestion in the real world that trigger increased prediction deviation. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Spatial-Temporal Conv-sequence Learning (STCL), in which a focused temporal block uses unidirectional convolution to effectively capture short-term periodic temporal dependence, and a spatial-temporal fusion module is able to extract the dependencies of both interactions and decrease the feature dimensions. Moreover, the accidents features impact on local traffic congestion, and position encoding is employed to detect anomalies in complex traffic situations. We conduct a large number of experiments on real-world tasks and verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Flow prediction (e.g., crowd flow, traffic flow) with features of spatial-temporal is increasingly investigated in AI research field. It is very challenging due to the complicated spatial dependencies between different locations and dynamic temporal dependencies among different time intervals. Although measurements of both dependencies are employed, existing methods suffer from the following two problems. First, the temporal dependencies are measured either uniformly or bias against long-term dependencies, which overlooks the distinctive impacts of short-term and long-term temporal dependencies. Second, the existing methods capture spatial and temporal dependencies independently, which wrongly assumes that the correlations between these dependencies are weak and ignores the complicated mutual influences between them. To address these issues, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Self-Attention Network (ST-SAN). As the path-length of attending long-term dependency is shorter in the self-attention mechanism, the vanishing of long-term temporal dependencies is prevented. In addition, since our model relies solely on attention mechanisms, the spatial and temporal dependencies can be simultaneously measured. Experimental results on real-world data demonstrate that, in comparison with state-of-the-art methods, our model reduces the root mean square errors by 9% in inflow prediction and 4% in outflow prediction on Taxi-NYC data, which is very significant compared to the previous improvement.
Spatial-temporal forecasting has attracted tremendous attention in a wide range of applications, and traffic flow prediction is a canonical and typical example. The complex and long-range spatial-temporal correlations of traffic flow bring it to a most intractable challenge. Existing works typically utilize shallow graph convolution networks (GNNs) and temporal extracting modules to model spatial and temporal dependencies respectively. However, the representation ability of such models is limited due to: (1) shallow GNNs are incapable to capture long-range spatial correlations, (2) only spatial connections are considered and a mass of semantic connections are ignored, which are of great importance for a comprehensive understanding of traffic networks. To this end, we propose Spatial-Temporal Graph Ordinary Differential Equation Networks (STGODE). Specifically, we capture spatial-temporal dynamics through a tensor-based ordinary differential equation (ODE), as a result, deeper networks can be constructed and spatial-temporal features are utilized synchronously. To understand the network more comprehensively, semantical adjacency matrix is considered in our model, and a well-design temporal dialated convolution structure is used to capture long term temporal dependencies. We evaluate our model on multiple real-world traffic datasets and superior performance is achieved over state-of-the-art baselines.
Adaptive traffic signal control plays a significant role in the construction of smart cities. This task is challenging because of many essential factors, such as cooperation among neighboring intersections and dynamic traffic scenarios. First, to facilitate cooperation of traffic signals, existing work adopts graph neural networks to incorporate the temporal and spatial influences of the surrounding intersections into the target intersection, where spatial-temporal information is used separately. However, one drawback of these methods is that the spatial-temporal correlations are not adequately exploited to obtain a better control scheme. Second, in a dynamic traffic environment, the historical state of the intersection is also critical for predicting future signal switching. Previous work mainly solves this problem using the current intersections state, neglecting the fact that traffic flow is continuously changing both spatially and temporally and does not handle the historical state. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network framework named DynSTGAT, which integrates dynamic historical state into a new spatial-temporal graph attention network to address the above two problems. More specifically, our DynSTGAT model employs a novel multi-head graph attention mechanism, which aims to adequately exploit the joint relations of spatial-temporal information. Then, to efficiently utilize the historical state information of the intersection, we design a sequence model with the temporal convolutional network (TCN) to capture the historical information and further merge it with the spatial information to improve its performance. Extensive experiments conducted in the multi-intersection scenario on synthetic data and real-world data confirm that our method can achieve superior performance in travel time and throughput against the state-of-the-art methods.
Accurate forecasting of traffic conditions is critical for improving safety, stability, and efficiency of a city transportation system. In reality, it is challenging to produce accurate traffic forecasts due to the complex and dynamic spatiotemporal correlations. Most existing works only consider partial characteristics and features of traffic data, and result in unsatisfactory performances on modeling and forecasting. In this paper, we propose a periodic spatial-temporal deep neural network (PSTN) with three pivotal modules to improve the forecasting performance of traffic conditions through a novel integration of three types of information. First, the historical traffic information is folded and fed into a module consisting of a graph convolutional network and a temporal convolutional network. Second, the recent traffic information together with the historical output passes through the second module consisting of a graph convolutional network and a gated recurrent unit framework. Finally, a multi-layer perceptron is applied to process the auxiliary road attributes and output the final predictions. Experimental results on two publicly accessible real-world urban traffic data sets show that the proposed PSTN outperforms the state-of-the-art benchmarks by significant margins for short-term traffic conditions forecasting