Deep Graph Gaussian Processes for Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting From Spatiotemporal Data

Accurate estimation of short-term traffic flow, which can help to assist travelers make better route choices, is a significant research field of intelligent transportation system. In order to extract complex spatiotemporal features from a small amount of available traffic data, in this paper we propose a novel Deep Graph Gaussian Processes (DGGPs) for short-term traffic flow prediction. First, in order to accurately describe the relationship between vertices in time series, this paper proposes an attention kernel. Based on this, the Aggregation Gaussian Process uses attention kernel as the covariance function, which overcomes the problem that the existing Gaussian processes and the deep Gaussian processes cannot effectively obtain dynamic spatial features. Second, DGGPs are constructed by the Aggregation Gaussian Process (AGP), the Temporal Convolutional Gaussian Process (TCGP) and the Gaussian process with linear kernel, to solve the existing short-term traffic flow forecasting models cannot obtain complex spatiotemporal features from a small amount of available data. We verify that the attention kernel helps to the proposed model convergence on the three data sets. At the same time, the proposed DGGP can obtain spatiotemporal features from the situation with less available spatial information or temporal information, accurately predict short-term traffic flow, and quantify temporal uncertainty.