MRA-DGCN: Multi-Range Attention-Based Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Prediction

Accurately obtaining information of road traffic conditions is of great significance to people’s travel planning and arrangement of social shared resources, and has become a major research focus in the field of smart cities. Accurately predicting road conditions poses a huge challenge due to the complex spatial correlations and nonlinear temporal dependencies of real-time traffic networks. In this paper we propose a Multi-Range Attention-Based Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network (MRA-DGCN) to model complex traffic networks. The MRA-DGCN model uses a bicomponent modules to separate different periodicity to extract refined traffic signal. In the MRA-DGCN model, we use the adaptive spatial-temporal network block (ASTnet block), which includes dynamic graph convolution and temporal attention, to mine complex spatial correlations and nonlinear temporal dependencies, respectively. In the adaptive spatial-temporal network block, we use dynamically generated adjacency matrices instead of existing distance-based adjacency matrices to perform graph convolution operations to aggregate information between nodes during model training. Instead of hierarchically extracting spatial-temporal signal, we adopt temporal attention to capture the spatial-temporal information synchronously to improve the prediction performance. Furthermore, we propose a residual gated network to control the flow of information passed to the next hidden layer to enhance the predictive accuracy. Extensive experiments on two real-world traffic datasets, METR-LA and PeMS-BAY, show that the MRA-DGCN achieves the state-of-the-art results.