sAMDGCN: sLSTM-Attention-Based Multi-Head Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Abstract

Accurate traffic flow prediction plays a vital role in intelligent transportation systems, helping traffic management departments maintain stable traffic order, reduce traffic congestion, and improve road safety. Existing prediction methods focus on dynamic modeling of the spatiotemporal dependencies of traffic flow, capturing the periodicity and spatial heterogeneity in traffic data. However, they still suffer from a lack of focus on the important local information in long-term predictions, leading to overly smooth results that fail to effectively capture sudden changes in traffic patterns. To address these limitations, we propose the sLSTM-Attention-Based Multi-Head Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network (sAMDGCN) model. Specifically, we extend sLSTM and introduce temporal trend-aware multi-head attention to jointly capture the complex temporal dependencies. We propose a multi-head dynamic graph convolutional network to capture a wider range of dynamic spatial dependencies. To validate the effectiveness of sAMDGCN, we perform extensive experiments on four real-world traffic flow datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed sAMDGCN model outperforms the advanced baseline methods in long-term traffic flow prediction tasks, demonstrating its superior performance in capturing complex and dynamic traffic patterns.

Keywords

• traffic flow prediction
• spatiotemporal dependency
• sLSTM
• attention
• graph convolutional network