Accurate and real-time traffic forecasting plays an important role in the intelligent traffic system and is of great significance for urban traffic planning, traffic management, and traffic control. However, traffic forecasting has always been considered an “open” scientific issue, owing to the constraints of urban road network topological structure and the law of dynamic change with time. To capture the spatial and temporal dependences simultaneously, we propose a novel neural network-based traffic forecasting method, the temporal graph convolutional network (T-GCN) model, which is combined with the graph convolutional network (GCN) and the gated recurrent unit (GRU). Specifically, the GCN is used to learn complex topological structures for capturing spatial dependence and the gated recurrent unit is used to learn dynamic changes of traffic data for capturing temporal dependence. Then, the T-GCN model is employed to traffic forecasting based on the urban road network. Experiments demonstrate that our T-GCN model can obtain the spatio-temporal correlation from traffic data and the predictions outperform state-of-art baselines on real-world traffic datasets. Our tensorflow implementation of the T-GCN is available at https://www.github.com/lehaifeng/T-GCN .

T-GCN: A Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Prediction

The ability to timely and accurately forecast the evolution of traffic is very important in traffic management and control applications. This paper proposes a non-parametric and data-driven methodology for short-term traffic forecasting based on identifying similar traffic patterns using an enhanced K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) algorithm. Weighted Euclidean distance, which gives more weight to recent measurements, is used as a similarity measure for K-NN. Moreover, winsorization of the neighbors is implemented to dampen the effects of dominant candidates, and rank exponent is used to aggregate the candidate values. Robustness of the proposed method is demonstrated by implementing it on large datasets collected from different regions and by comparing it with advanced time series models, such as SARIMA and adaptive Kalman Filter models proposed by others. It is demonstrated that the proposed method reduces the mean absolute percent error by more than 25%. In addition, the effectiveness of the proposed enhanced K-NN algorithm is evaluated for multiple forecast steps and also its performance is tested under data with missing values. This research provides strong evidence suggesting that the proposed non-parametric and data-driven approach for short-term traffic forecasting provides promising results. Given the simplicity, accuracy, and robustness of the proposed approach, it can be easily incorporated with real-time traffic control for proactive freeway traffic management.

http://www.tri-odu.org/uploads/3/9/2/6/39268609/paper_-_short-term_traffic_forecast_-_revised_version_-_09-01-2015.pdf

Short-term traffic flow rate forecasting based on identifying similar traffic patterns

Multistep traffic forecasting on road networks is a crucial task in successful intelligent transportation system applications. To capture the complex non-stationary temporal dynamics and spatial correlations in multistep traffic-condition prediction, we propose a novel deep learning framework named attention graph convolutional sequence-to-sequence model (AGC-Seq2Seq). In the proposed deep learning framework, spatial and temporal dependencies are modeled through the Seq2Seq model and graph convolution network separately, and the attention mechanism along with a newly designed training method based on the Seq2Seq architecture is proposed to overcome the difficulty in multistep prediction and further capture the temporal heterogeneity of traffic pattern. We conduct numerical tests to compare AGC-Seq2Seq with other benchmark models using two real-world datasets. The results indicate that our model yields the best prediction performance in terms of various prediction error measures. Furthermore, the variations of spatio-temporal correlations of traffic conditions under different perdition steps and road segments are revealed.

Multistep speed prediction on traffic networks: A deep learning approach considering spatio-temporal dependencies

Accurate and real-time traffic forecasting plays an important role in the Intelligent Traffic System and is of great significance for urban traffic planning, traffic management, and traffic control. However, traffic forecasting has always been considered an open scientific issue, owing to the constraints of urban road network topological structure and the law of dynamic change with time, namely, spatial dependence and temporal dependence. To capture the spatial and temporal dependence simultaneously, we propose a novel neural network-based traffic forecasting method, the temporal graph convolutional network (T-GCN) model, which is in combination with the graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU). Specifically, the GCN is used to learn complex topological structures to capture spatial dependence and the gated recurrent unit is used to learn dynamic changes of traffic data to capture temporal dependence. Then, the T-GCN model is employed to traffic forecasting based on the urban road network. Experiments demonstrate that our T-GCN model can obtain the spatio-temporal correlation from traffic data and the predictions outperform state-of-art baselines on real-world traffic datasets. Our tensorflow implementation of the T-GCN is available at this https URL.

Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Urban Traffic Flow Prediction Method.

Short-term traffic speed prediction is one of the most critical components of an intelligent transportation system ITS. The accurate and real-time prediction of traffic speeds can support travellers' route choices and traffic guidance/control. In this article, a support vector machine model single-step prediction model composed of spatial and temporal parameters is proposed. Furthermore, a short-term traffic speed prediction model is developed based on the single-step prediction model. To test the accuracy of the proposed short-term traffic speed prediction model, its application is illustrated using GPS data from taxis in Foshan city, China. The results indicate that the error of the short-term traffic speed prediction varies from 3.31% to 15.35%. The support vector machine model with spatial-temporal parameters exhibits good performance compared with an artificial neural network, a k-nearest neighbor model, a historical data-based model, and a moving average data-based model.

Nai Wei

Papers

An Improved K-nearest Neighbor Model for Short-term Traffic Flow Prediction