No Arabic abstract
The goal of the IARAI competition traffic4cast was to predict the city-wide traffic status within a 15-minute time window, based on information from the previous hour. The traffic status was given as multi-channel images (one pixel roughly corresponds to 100x100 meters), where one channel indicated the traffic volume, another one the average speed of vehicles, and a third one their rough heading. As part of our work on the competition, we evaluated many different network architectures, analyzed the statistical properties of the given data in detail, and thought about how to transform the problem to be able to take additional spatio-temporal context-information into account, such as the street network, the positions of traffic lights, or the weather. This document summarizes our efforts that led to our best submission, and gives some insights about which other approaches we evaluated, and why they did not work as well as imagined.
The problem of the effective prediction for large-scale spatio-temporal traffic data has long haunted researchers in the field of intelligent transportation. Limited by the quantity of data, citywide traffic state prediction was seldom achieved. Hence the complex urban transportation system of an entire city cannot be truly understood. Thanks to the efforts of organizations like IARAI, the massive open data provided by them has made the research possible. In our 2020 Competition solution, we further design multiple variants based on HR-NET and UNet. Through feature engineering, the hand-crafted features are input into the model in a form of channels. It is worth noting that, to learn the inherent attributes of geographical locations, we proposed a novel method called geo-embedding, which contributes to significant improvement in the accuracy of the model. In addition, we explored the influence of the selection of activation functions and optimizers, as well as tricks during model training on the model performance. In terms of prediction accuracy, our solution has won 2nd place in NeurIPS 2020, Traffic4cast Challenge.
We describe the submission of the Quo Vadis team to the Traffic4cast competition, which was organized as part of the NeurIPS 2019 series of challenges. Our system consists of a temporal regression module, implemented as $1times1$ 2d convolutions, augmented with spatio-temporal biases. We have found that using biases is a straightforward and efficient way to include seasonal patterns and to improve the performance of the temporal regression model. Our implementation obtains a mean squared error of $9.47times 10^{-3}$ on the test data, placing us on the eight place team-wise. We also present our attempts at incorporating spatial correlations into the model; however, contrary to our expectations, adding this type of auxiliary information did not benefit the main system. Our code is available at https://github.com/danoneata/traffic4cast.
Traffic forecasting has emerged as a core component of intelligent transportation systems. However, timely accurate traffic forecasting, especially long-term forecasting, still remains an open challenge due to the highly nonlinear and dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies of traffic flows. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm of Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks (STTNs) that leverages dynamical directed spatial dependencies and long-range temporal dependencies to improve the accuracy of long-term traffic forecasting. Specifically, we present a new variant of graph neural networks, named spatial transformer, by dynamically modeling directed spatial dependencies with self-attention mechanism to capture realtime traffic conditions as well as the directionality of traffic flows. Furthermore, different spatial dependency patterns can be jointly modeled with multi-heads attention mechanism to consider diverse relationships related to different factors (e.g. similarity, connectivity and covariance). On the other hand, the temporal transformer is utilized to model long-range bidirectional temporal dependencies across multiple time steps. Finally, they are composed as a block to jointly model the spatial-temporal dependencies for accurate traffic prediction. Compared to existing works, the proposed model enables fast and scalable training over a long range spatial-temporal dependencies. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive results compared with the state-of-the-arts, especially forecasting long-term traffic flows on real-world PeMS-Bay and PeMSD7(M) datasets.
Traffic forecasting is crucial for urban traffic management and guidance. However, existing methods rarely exploit the time-frequency properties of traffic speed observations, and often neglect the propagation of traffic flows from upstream to downstream road segments. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach that learns the spatio-temporal dependency in traffic flows and predicts short-term traffic speeds on a road network. Specifically, we employ wavelet transform to decompose raw traffic data into several components with different frequency sub-bands. A Motif-based Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (Motif-GCRNN) and Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) are used to train and predict low-frequency components and high-frequency components, respectively. In the Motif-GCRNN framework, we integrate Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) with local sub-graph structures - Motifs - to capture the spatial correlations among road segments, and apply Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to extract the short-term and periodic patterns in traffic speeds. Experiments on a traffic dataset collected in Chengdu, China, demonstrate that the proposed hybrid method outperforms six state-of-art prediction methods.
The concept of mobility prediction represents one of the key enablers for an efficient management of future cellular networks, which tend to be progressively more elaborate and dense due to the aggregation of multiple technologies. In this letter we aim to investigate the problem of cellular traffic prediction over a metropolitan area and propose a deep regression (DR) approach to model its complex spatio-temporal dynamics. DR is instrumental in capturing multi-scale and multi-domain dependences of mobile data by solving an image-to-image regression problem. A parametric relationship between input and expected output is defined and grid search is put in place to isolate and optimize performance. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method achieves a lower prediction error against stateof-the-art algorithms. We validate forecasting performance and stability by using a large public dataset of a European Provider.