Augmented Multi-Component Recurrent Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Abstract

Due to the periodic and dynamic changes of traffic flow and the spatial–temporal coupling interaction of complex road networks, traffic flow forecasting is highly challenging and rarely yields satisfactory prediction results. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology named the Augmented Multi-component Recurrent Graph Convolutional Network (AM-RGCN) for traffic flow forecasting by addressing the problems above. We first introduce the augmented multi-component module to the traffic forecasting model to tackle the problem of periodic temporal shift emerging in traffic series. Then, we propose an encoder–decoder architecture for spatial–temporal prediction. Specifically, we propose the Temporal Correlation Learner (TCL) which incorporates one-dimensional convolution into LSTM to utilize the intrinsic temporal characteristics of traffic flow. Moreover, we combine TCL with the graph convolutional network to handle the spatial–temporal coupling interaction of the road network. Similarly, the decoder consists of TCL and convolutional neural networks to obtain high-dimensional representations from multi-step predictions based on spatial–temporal sequences. Extensive experiments on two real-world road traffic datasets, PEMSD4 and PEMSD8, demonstrate that our AM-RGCN achieves the best results.

Keywords

• traffic flow forecasting
• spatial–temporal prediction
• graph convolutional networks
• augmented multi-component