Multi-Head Spatiotemporal Attention Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Prediction

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have become an indispensable component of modern global technological development, as they play a massive role in the accurate statistical estimation of vehicles or individuals commuting to a particular transportation facility at a given time. This provides...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ariyo Oluwasanmi, Muhammad Umar Aftab, Zhiguang Qin, Muhammad Shahzad Sarfraz, Yang Yu, Hafiz Tayyab Rauf
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-04-01
Series:Sensors
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/8/3836
Description
Summary:Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have become an indispensable component of modern global technological development, as they play a massive role in the accurate statistical estimation of vehicles or individuals commuting to a particular transportation facility at a given time. This provides the perfect backdrop for designing and engineering an adequate infrastructural capacity for transportation analyses. However, traffic prediction remains a daunting task due to the non-Euclidean and complex distribution of road networks and the topological constraints of urbanized road networks. To solve this challenge, this paper presents a traffic forecasting model which combines a graph convolutional network, a gated recurrent unit, and a multi-head attention mechanism to simultaneously capture and incorporate the spatio-temporal dependence and dynamic variation in the topological sequence of traffic data effectively. By achieving 91.8% accuracy on the Los Angeles highway traffic (Los-loop) test data for 15-min traffic prediction and an R2 score of 85% on the Shenzhen City (SZ-taxi) test dataset for 15- and 30-min predictions, the proposed model demonstrated that it can learn the global spatial variation and the dynamic temporal sequence of traffic data over time. This has resulted in state-of-the-art traffic forecasting for the SZ-taxi and Los-loop datasets.
ISSN:1424-8220