Road traffic flow prediction based on dynamic spatiotemporal graph attention network

Abstract To improve the prediction accuracy of traffic flow under the influence of nearby time traffic flow disturbance, a dynamic spatiotemporal graph attention network traffic flow prediction model based on the attention mechanism was proposed. Considering the macroscopic periodic characteristics of traffic flow, the spatiotemporal features are extracted by constructing spatiotemporal blocks with an adjacent period, daily period, and weekly period respectively. The spatiotemporal block is mainly composed of a two-layer graph attention network and a gated recurrent unit to capture the hidden features of space and time. In space, based on considering adjacent road segments, the Pearson correlation coefficient is used to capture the hidden correlation characteristics between non-adjacent road segments according to a certain time step. In terms of time, due to the random disturbance of traffic flow at the micro level, the attention mechanism is introduced to use the adjacent time as the query matrix to weight the output characteristics of daily cycle and weekly cycle, and the three are connected in series to output the prediction results through the linear layer. Finally, the experimental results on the public data sets show that the proposed model is superior to the six baseline models