Spatial–temporal dependence and similarity aware traffic flow forecasting

Traffic flow forecasting is the cornerstone of the development of intelligent transportation systems. Accurate forecasting is conducive to the control and management of urban traffic. However, it is still a challenge to extract the complex spatial–temporal relationships in the traffic flow. The existing methods based on Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) can effectively extract spatial–temporal dependence, but it is difficult to extract spatial–temporal similarity because of the limitation of the graph structure. In this paper, we propose a spatial–temporal dependence and similarity-aware method called Dependence and Similarity aware Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (DS-TGCN), which combines two modules to extract the complex spatial–temporal relationships and make traffic flow forecasting. One module is our Spatial–Temporal Similarity Feature module (STSF) newly designed for extracting the spatial–temporal similarity directly. Another module is the spatial–temporal convolution module with an attention mechanism, which can extract spatial–temporal dependence dynamically. The experiments on two types of datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of the effectiveness of traffic flow forecasting.