Forecasting traffic flows in irregular regions with multi-graph convolutional network and gated recurrent unit

Abstract

The prediction of regional traffic flows is important for traffic control and management in an intelligent traffic system. With the help of deep neural networks, the convolutional neural network or residual neural network, which can be applied only to regular grids, is adopted to capture the spatial dependence for flow prediction. However, the obtained regions are always irregular considering the road network and administrative boundaries; thus, dividing the city into grids is inaccurate for prediction. In this paper, we propose a new model based on multi-graph convolutional network and gated recurrent unit (MGCN-GRU) to predict traffic flows for irregular regions. Specifically, we first construct heterogeneous inter-region graphs for a city to reflect the relationships among regions. In each graph, nodes represent the irregular regions and edges represent the relationship types between regions. Then, we propose a multi-graph convolutional network to fuse different inter-region graphs and additional attributes. The GRU is further used to capture the temporal dependence and to predict future traffic flows. Experimental results based on three real-world large-scale datasets (public bicycle system dataset, taxi dataset, and dockless bike-sharing dataset) show that our MGCN-GRU model outperforms a variety of existing methods.

Keywords

Traffic flow prediction / Multi-graph convolutional network / Gated recurrent unit / Irregular regions

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2021 Zhejiang University Press