Traffic flow prediction model based on spatio-Temporal dilated graph convolution

Abstract

With the increase of motor vehicles and tourism demand, some traffic problems gradually appear, such as traffic congestion, safety accidents and insufficient allocation of traffic resources. Facing these challenges, a model of Spatio-Temporal Dilated Convolutional Network (STDGCN) is proposed for assistance of extracting highly nonlinear and complex characteristics to accurately predict the future traffic flow. In particular, we model the traffic as undirected graphs, on which graph convolutions are built to extract spatial feature informations. Furthermore, a dilated convolution is deployed into graph convolution for capturing multi-scale contextual messages. The proposed STDGCN integrates the dilated convolution into the graph convolution, which realizes the extraction of the spatial and temporal characteristics of traffic flow data, as well as features of road occupancy. To observe the performance of the proposed model, we compare with it with four rivals. We also employ four indicators for evaluation. The experimental results show STDGCN’s effectiveness. The prediction accuracy is improved by 17% in comparison with the traditional prediction methods on various real-world traffic datasets.