STAGCN: Spatial–Temporal Attention Graph Convolution Network for Traffic Forecasting

Abstract

Traffic forecasting plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems. However, the prediction task is highly challenging due to the mixture of global and local spatiotemporal dependencies involved in traffic data. Existing graph neural networks (GNNs) typically capture spatial dependencies with the predefined or learnable static graph structure, ignoring the hidden dynamic patterns in traffic networks. Meanwhile, most recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or convolutional neural networks (CNNs) cannot effectively capture temporal correlations, especially for long-term temporal dependencies. In this paper, we propose a spatial–temporal attention graph convolution network (STAGCN), which acquires a static graph and a dynamic graph from data without any prior knowledge. The static graph aims to model global space adaptability, and the dynamic graph is designed to capture local dynamics in the traffic network. A gated temporal attention module is further introduced for long-term temporal dependencies, where a causal-trend attention mechanism is proposed to increase the awareness of causality and local trends in time series. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic flow datasets demonstrate that STAGCN achieves an outstanding prediction accuracy improvement over existing solutions.

Keywords

• deep learning
• traffic forecasting
• graph convolution networks
• attention mechanism
• spatial–temporal graph data