A Hybrid Deep Learning Approach with GCN and LSTM for Traffic Flow Prediction

Traffic flow prediction is an important functional component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In this paper, we propose a hybrid deep learning approach, called graph and attention-based long short-term memory network (GLA), to efficiently capture the spatial-temporal features in traffic flow. Firstly, we apply graph convolutional network (GCN) to mine the spatial relationships of traffic flow over multiple observation stations, in which the adjacent matrix is determined by a data-driven approach. Then, we feed the output of the GCN model to the long short-term memory (LSTM) model which extracts temporal features embedded in traffic flow. Further, we implement a soft attention mechanism on the extracted spatial-temporal traffic features to make final prediction. We test the proposed method over the PeMS data sets. Experimental results show that the proposed model performs better than the competing methods.