STGAT: Spatial-Temporal Graph Attention Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Traffic flow forecasting is a critical task for urban traffic control and dispatch in the field of transportation, which is characterized by the high nonlinearity and complexity. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning based dual path framework, i.e., Spatial-Temporal Graph Attention Network (STGAT), for traffic flow forecasting. Specifically, different from previous structure-based approaches, STGAT can be directly generalized to the graph with arbitrary structure. Furthermore, STGAT is capable of handling long temporal sequence by stacking gated temporal convolution layer. The dual path architectures is proposed for taking both potential and existing spatial dependencies into account. By capturing potential spatial dependencies will naturally catch more useful information for forecasting. We design a gated fusion mechanism to combine the outputs from each path. The proposed model can be directly applicable to inductive learning tasks by introducing a graph attention mechanism into spatial-temporal framework, which means our model can be generalized to completely unseen graphs. Moreover, experimental results on two public real-world traffic network datasets, METR-LA and PEMS-BAY, show that our STGAT outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, we demonstrate the proposed model is competent for efficient migration between graphs with different structures.