Spatio-Temporal Heterogeneity-Oriented Graph Convolutional Network for Urban Traffic Flow Prediction

In the realm of urban vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), cross-domain data has constituted a multifaceted amalgamation of information sources, which significantly enhances the accuracy and response speed of traffic prediction. However, the interplay between spatial and temporal heterogeneity will complicate the complexity of geographical locations or physical connections in the data normalization. Besides, the traffic pattern differences incurred by dynamic external factors also bring cumulative and sensitive impacts during the construction of the prediction model. In this work, we propose the spatio-temporal heterogeneity-oriented graph convolutional network (SHGCN) to tackle the above challenges. First, the SHGCN analytically employs spatial heterogeneity between urban streets rather than simple adjacency relationships to reveal the spatio-temporal correlations of traffic stream movement. Then, the air quality data is taken as external factors to identify the traffic forecasting trend at the street level. The hybrid model of the graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) is designed to investigate cross-correlation characteristics. Finally, with the real-world urban datasets, experimental results demonstrate that the SHGCN achieves improvements, with the RMSE and MAE reductions ranging from 2.91% to 41.26% compared to baseline models. Ablation studies confirm that integrating air quality factors with traffic patterns enhances prediction performance at varying degrees, validating the method’s effectiveness in capturing the complex correlations among air pollutants, traffic flow dynamics, and road network topology.