Multilevel Federated Learning-Based Intelligent Traffic Flow Forecasting for Transportation Network Management

Accurate traffic flow forecasting is crucial to improving traffic safety and alleviating road congestion for intelligent transportation network management. Recently, spatial-temporal graph-based deep learning methods have achieving significant performance improvements in traffic flow forecasting. However, they only consider spatial-temporal correlation of traffic network but ignore a mass of semantic correlation. In addition, they need to centralize data for training models, leading to privacy leakage concern. To tackle these problems, we introduce a federated learning-based intelligent traffic flow forecasting model that integrates our proposed spatial-temporal graph-based deep learning model into the devised Multilevel Federated Learning framework(MFL), named MFVSTGNN. This MFL is used to allow data collaboration among different data owners to train an efficient model without sharing their private data, while achieving the trade-off between communication overhead and computation performance. The proposed spatial-temporal graph-based deep learning model is composed of two phases. The first phase utilizes Variational Graph Autoencoder (VGAE) to dynamically generate adjacency matrix that contains both the spatial and semantic dependencies, contributing to preserving valuable information for improving prediction accuracy, and the second phase employs general spatial-temporal graph neural network to conduct prediction. We evaluate the performance of MFVSTGNN with two large-scale traffic datasets from California and Los Angeles County. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of MFVSTGNN in reducing communication overhead, and improving prediction accuracy, validating the effectiveness of our proposed model.