FASTGNN: A Topological Information Protected Federated Learning Approach for Traffic Speed Forecasting

Federated learning has been applied to various tasks in intelligent transportation systems to protect data privacy through decentralized training schemes. The majority of the state-of-the-art models in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are graph neural networks (GNN)-based for spatial information learning. When applying federated learning to the ITS tasks with GNN-based models, the existing frameworks can only protect the data privacy; however, ignore the one of topological information of transportation networks. In this article, we propose a novel federated learning framework to tackle this problem. Specifically, we introduce a differential privacy-based adjacency matrix preserving approach for protecting the topological information. We also propose an adjacency matrix aggregation approach to allow local GNN-based models to access the global network for a better training effect. Furthermore, we propose a GNN-based model named attention-based spatial-temporal graph neural networks (ASTGNN) for traffic speed forecasting. We integrate the proposed federated learning framework and ASTGNN as FASTGNN for traffic speed forecasting. Extensive case studies on a real-world dataset demonstrate that FASTGNN can develop accurate forecasting under the privacy preservation constraint.