Weather Interaction-Aware Spatio-Temporal Attention Networks for Urban Traffic Flow Prediction

Abstract

As the cornerstone of intelligent transportation systems, accurate traffic prediction can reduce the pressure of urban traffic, reduce the cost of residents’ travel time, and provide a reference basis for urban construction planning. Existing traffic prediction methods focus on spatio-temporal dependence modeling, ignoring the influence of weather factors on spatio-temporal characteristics, and the prediction task has complexity and an uneven distribution in different spatio-temporal scenarios and weather changes. In view of this, we propose a weather interaction-aware spatio-temporal attention network (WST-ANet), in which we integrate feature models and dynamic graph modules in the encoder and decoder, and use a spatio-temporal weather interaction perception module for prediction. Firstly, the contextual semantics of the traffic flows are fused using a feature embedding module to improve the adaptability to weather drivers; then, an encoder–decoder is constructed by combining the Dynamic Graph Module and the WSTA Block, to extract spatio-temporal aggregated correlations in the roadway network; finally, the feature information of the encoder was weighted and aggregated using the cross-focusing mechanism, and attention was paid to the hidden state of the encoding. Traffic flow was predicted using the PeMS04 and PeMS08 datasets and compared with multiple typical baseline models. It was learned through extensive experiments that the accuracy evaluation result is the smallest in WST-ANet, which demonstrated the superiority of the proposed model. This can more accurately predict future changes in traffic in different weather conditions, providing decision makers with a basis for optimizing scenarios.

Keywords

• urban traffic flow prediction
• weather interaction perception
• graph attention network
• dynamic spatio-temporal dependence
• attention