Region-Level Traffic Prediction Based on Temporal Multi-Spatial Dependence Graph Convolutional Network from GPS Data

Region-level traffic information can characterize dynamic changes of urban traffic at the macro level. Real-time region-level traffic prediction help city traffic managers with traffic demand analysis, traffic congestion control, and other activities, and it has become a research hotspot. As more vehicles are equipped with GPS devices, remote sensing data can be collected and used to conduct data-driven region-level-based traffic prediction. However, due to dynamism and randomness of urban traffic and the complexity of urban road networks, the study of such issues faces many challenges. This paper proposes a new deep learning model named TmS-GCN to predict region-level traffic information, which is composed of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). The GCN part captures spatial dependence among regions, while the GRU part captures the dynamic change of traffic within the region. Model verification and comparison are carried out using real taxi GPS data from Shenzhen. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms both the classic time series prediction model and the deep learning model at different scales.