TARGCN: temporal attention recurrent graph convolutional neural network for traffic prediction

Traffic prediction is crucial to the intelligent transportation system. However, accurate traffic prediction still faces challenges. It is difficult to extract dynamic spatial–temporal correlations of traffic flow and capture the specific traffic pattern for each sub-region. In this paper, a temporal attention recurrent graph convolutional neural network (TARGCN) is proposed to address these issues. The proposed TARGCN model fuses a node-embedded graph convolutional (Emb-GCN) layer, a gated recurrent unit (GRU) layer, and a temporal attention (TA) layer into a framework to exploit both dynamic spatial correlations between traffic nodes and temporal dependencies between time slices. In the Emb-GCN layer, node embedding matrix and node parameter learning techniques are employed to extract spatial correlations between traffic nodes at a fine-grained level and learn the specific traffic pattern for each node. Following this, a series of gated recurrent units are stacked as a GRU layer to capture spatial and temporal features from the traffic flow of adjacent nodes in the past few time slices simultaneously. Furthermore, an attention layer is applied in the temporal dimension to extend the receptive field of GRU. The combination of the Emb-GCN, GRU, and the TA layer facilitates the proposed framework exploiting not only the spatial–temporal dependencies but also the degree of interconnectedness between traffic nodes, which benefits the prediction a lot. Experiments on public traffic datasets PEMSD4 and PEMSD8 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with state-of-the-art baselines, it achieves 4.62% and 5.78% on PEMS03, 3.08% and 0.37% on PEMSD4, and 5.08% and 0.28% on PEMSD8 superiority on average. Especially for long-term prediction, prediction results for the 60-min interval show the proposed method presents a more notable advantage over compared benchmarks. The implementation on Pytorch is publicly available at https://github.com/csust-sonie/TARGCN .