No Arabic abstract
Research in deep learning models to forecast traffic intensities has gained great attention in recent years due to their capability to capture the complex spatio-temporal relationships within the traffic data. However, most state-of-the-art approaches have designed spatial-only (e.g. Graph Neural Networks) and temporal-only (e.g. Recurrent Neural Networks) modules to separately extract spatial and temporal features. However, we argue that it is less effective to extract the complex spatio-temporal relationship with such factorized modules. Besides, most existing works predict the traffic intensity of a particular time interval only based on the traffic data of the previous one hour of that day. And thereby ignores the repetitive daily/weekly pattern that may exist in the last hour of data. Therefore, we propose a Unified Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolution Network (USTGCN) for traffic forecasting that performs both spatial and temporal aggregation through direct information propagation across different timestamp nodes with the help of spectral graph convolution on a spatio-temporal graph. Furthermore, it captures historical daily patterns in previous days and current-day patterns in current-day traffic data. Finally, we validate our works effectiveness through experimental analysis, which shows that our model USTGCN can outperform state-of-the-art performances in three popular benchmark datasets from the Performance Measurement System (PeMS). Moreover, the training time is reduced significantly with our proposed USTGCN model.
To capture spatial relationships and temporal dynamics in traffic data, spatio-temporal models for traffic forecasting have drawn significant attention in recent years. Most of the recent works employed graph neural networks(GNN) with multiple layers to capture the spatial dependency. However, road junctions with different hop-distance can carry distinct traffic information which should be exploited separately but existing multi-layer GNNs are incompetent to discriminate between their impact. Again, to capture the temporal interrelationship, recurrent neural networks are common in state-of-the-art approaches that often fail to capture long-range dependencies. Furthermore, traffic data shows repeated patterns in a daily or weekly period which should be addressed explicitly. To address these limitations, we have designed a Simplified Spatio-temporal Traffic forecasting GNN(SST-GNN) that effectively encodes the spatial dependency by separately aggregating different neighborhood representations rather than with multiple layers and capture the temporal dependency with a simple yet effective weighted spatio-temporal aggregation mechanism. We capture the periodic traffic patterns by using a novel position encoding scheme with historical and current data in two different models. With extensive experimental analysis, we have shown that our model has significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art models on three real-world traffic datasets from the Performance Measurement System (PeMS).
Telecommunication networks play a critical role in modern society. With the arrival of 5G networks, these systems are becoming even more diversified, integrated, and intelligent. Traffic forecasting is one of the key components in such a system, however, it is particularly challenging due to the complex spatial-temporal dependency. In this work, we consider this problem from the aspect of a cellular network and the interactions among its base stations. We thoroughly investigate the characteristics of cellular network traffic and shed light on the dependency complexities based on data collected from a densely populated metropolis area. Specifically, we observe that the traffic shows both dynamic and static spatial dependencies as well as diverse cyclic temporal patterns. To address these complexities, we propose an effective deep-learning-based approach, namely, Spatio-Temporal Hybrid Graph Convolutional Network (STHGCN). It employs GRUs to model the temporal dependency, while capturing the complex spatial dependency through a hybrid-GCN from three perspectives: spatial proximity, functional similarity, and recent trend similarity. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world traffic datasets collected from telecommunication networks. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in that it consistently outperforms both classical methods and state-of-the-art deep learning models, while being more robust and stable.
In this work, we examine a novel forecasting approach for COVID-19 case prediction that uses Graph Neural Networks and mobility data. In contrast to existing time series forecasting models, the proposed approach learns from a single large-scale spatio-temporal graph, where nodes represent the region-level human mobility, spatial edges represent the human mobility based inter-region connectivity, and temporal edges represent node features through time. We evaluate this approach on the US county level COVID-19 dataset, and demonstrate that the rich spatial and temporal information leveraged by the graph neural network allows the model to learn complex dynamics. We show a 6% reduction of RMSLE and an absolute Pearson Correlation improvement from 0.9978 to 0.998 compared to the best performing baseline models. This novel source of information combined with graph based deep learning approaches can be a powerful tool to understand the spread and evolution of COVID-19. We encourage others to further develop a novel modeling paradigm for infectious disease based on GNNs and high resolution mobility data.
We established a Spatio-Temporal Neural Network, namely STNN, to forecast the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak worldwide in 2020. The basic structure of STNN is similar to the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) incorporating with not only temporal data but also spatial features. Two improved STNN architectures, namely the STNN with Augmented Spatial States (STNN-A) and the STNN with Input Gate (STNN-I), are proposed, which ensure more predictability and flexibility. STNN and its variants can be trained using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm and its improved variants (e.g., Adam, AdaGrad and RMSProp). Our STNN models are compared with several classical epidemic prediction models, including the fully-connected neural network (BPNN), and the recurrent neural network (RNN), the classical curve fitting models, as well as the SEIR dynamical system model. Numerical simulations demonstrate that STNN models outperform many others by providing more accurate fitting and prediction, and by handling both spatial and temporal data.
Traffic flow forecasting is of great significance for improving the efficiency of transportation systems and preventing emergencies. Due to the highly non-linearity and intricate evolutionary patterns of short-term and long-term traffic flow, existing methods often fail to take full advantage of spatial-temporal information, especially the various temporal patterns with different period shifting and the characteristics of road segments. Besides, the globality representing the absolute value of traffic status indicators and the locality representing the relative value have not been considered simultaneously. This paper proposes a neural network model that focuses on the globality and locality of traffic networks as well as the temporal patterns of traffic data. The cycle-based dilated deformable convolution block is designed to capture different time-varying trends on each node accurately. Our model can extract both global and local spatial information since we combine two graph convolutional network methods to learn the representations of nodes and edges. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that the model can scrutinize the spatial-temporal correlation of traffic data, and its performance is better than the compared state-of-the-art methods. Further analysis indicates that the locality and globality of the traffic networks are critical to traffic flow prediction and the proposed TSSRGCN model can adapt to the various temporal traffic patterns.