Dynamic Spatial–Temporal Self-Attention Network for Traffic Flow Prediction

Dong Wang, Hongji Yang () and Hua Zhou ()
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Dong Wang: National Pilot School of Software, Yunnan University, Kunming 650091, China
Hongji Yang: School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK
Hua Zhou: College of Big Data and Intelligent Engineering, SouthWest Forestry University, Kunming 650233, China

Future Internet, 2024, vol. 16, issue 6, 1-20

Abstract: Traffic flow prediction is considered to be one of the fundamental technologies in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) with a tremendous application prospect. Unlike traditional time series analysis tasks, the key challenge in traffic flow prediction lies in effectively modelling the highly complex and dynamic spatiotemporal dependencies within the traffic data. In recent years, researchers have proposed various methods to enhance the accuracy of traffic flow prediction, but certain issues still persist. For instance, some methods rely on specific static assumptions, failing to adequately simulate the dynamic changes in the data, thus limiting their modelling capacity. On the other hand, some approaches inadequately capture the spatiotemporal dependencies, resulting in the omission of crucial information and leading to unsatisfactory prediction outcomes. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a model called the Dynamic Spatial–Temporal Self-Attention Network (DSTSAN). Firstly, this research enhances the interaction between different dimension features in the traffic data through a feature augmentation module, thereby improving the model’s representational capacity. Subsequently, the current investigation introduces two masking matrices: one captures local spatial dependencies and the other captures global spatial dependencies, based on the spatial self-attention module. Finally, the methodology employs a temporal self-attention module to capture and integrate the dynamic temporal dependencies of traffic data. We designed experiments using historical data from the previous hour to predict traffic flow conditions in the hour ahead, and the experiments were extensively compared to the DSTSAN model, with 11 baseline methods using four real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

Keywords: traffic flow prediction; spatiotemporal dependence; time series prediction; attention mechanism; graph convolution network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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