EnGS-DGR: Traffic Flow Forecasting with Indefinite Forecasting Interval by Ensemble GCN, Seq2Seq, and Dynamic Graph Reconfiguration

An accurate and reliable forecast for traffic flow is regarded as one of the foundational functions in an intelligent transportation system. In this paper, a new model for traffic flow forecasting, named EnGS-DGR, is designed based on ensemble learning of graph convolutional network (GCN), sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) learning model, and dynamic graph reconfiguration (DGR) algorithm. At the first stage, instead of employing entire nodes in the traffic network, the DGR algorithm is proposed to reconstruct the traffic graph topology consisting of traffic nodes with tight correlation under a specific forecasting interval, where the degree of correlation among the traffic nodes is quantized from the perspective of multi-view clustering. At the second stage, GCN-Seq2Seq integration strategy is introduced to extract the data of the spatio-temporal dependence and forecast traffic flow. We applied the proposed EnGS-DGR to two different datasets from the highways of Los Angeles County and of California’s Bay Area; the simulation results show that the proposed EnGS-DGR is superior to other eight popular models for traffic flow forecasting in terms of three common performance metrics