Cross-Attention Fusion Based Spatial-Temporal Multi-Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Flow Prediction

Accurate traffic flow prediction is essential to building a smart transportation city. Existing research mainly uses a given single-graph structure as a model, only considers local and static spatial dependencies, and ignores the impact of dynamic spatio-temporal data diversity. To fully capture the characteristics of spatio-temporal data diversity, this paper proposes a cross-Attention Fusion Based Spatial-Temporal Multi-Graph Convolutional Network (CAFMGCN) model for traffic flow prediction. First, introduce GCN to model the historical traffic data’s three-time attributes (current, daily, and weekly) to extract time features. Second, consider the relationship between distance and traffic flow, constructing adjacency, connectivity, and regional similarity graphs to capture dynamic spatial topology information. To make full use of global information, a cross-attention mechanism is introduced to fuse temporal and spatial features separately to reduce prediction errors. Finally, the CAFMGCN model is evaluated, and the experimental results show that the prediction of this model is more accurate and effective than the baseline of other models.