Non-end-to-end adaptive graph learning for multi-scale temporal traffic flow prediction

Kang Xu, Bin Pan, MingXin Zhang, Xuan Zhang, XiaoYu Hou, JingXian Yu, ZhiZhu Lu, Xiao Zeng and QingQing Jia

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 6, 1-21

Abstract: Accurate traffic flow prediction is vital for intelligent transportation systems but presents significant challenges. Existing methods, however, have the following limitations: (1) insufficient exploration of interactions across different temporal scales, which restricts effective future flow prediction; (2) reliance on predefined graph structures in graph neural networks, making it challenging to accurately model the spatial relationships in complex road networks; and (3) end-to-end training, which often results in unclear optimization directions for model parameters, thereby limiting improvements in predictive performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a non-end-to-end adaptive graph learning algorithm capable of effectively capturing complex dependencies. The method incorporates a multi-scale temporal attention module and a multi-scale temporal convolution module to extract multi-scale information. Additionally, a novel graph learning module is designed to adaptively capture potential correlations between nodes during training. The parameters of the prediction and graph learning modules are alternately optimized, ensuring global performance improvement under locally optimal conditions. Furthermore, the graph structure is dynamically updated using a weighted summation approach.Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves prediction accuracy on the PeMSD4 and PeMSD8 datasets. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each module, and the rationality of the graph structures generated by the graph learning module is visually confirmed, showcasing excellent predictive performance.

Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0322145

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0322145

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