Traffic flow prediction based on spatiotemporal encoder-decoder model

Yuanming Ding, Wei Zhao, Lin Song, Chen Jiang and Yunrui Tao

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 5, 1-28

Abstract: To more effectively capture the periodic and dynamic changes in urban traffic flow and the spatiotemporal correlation of complex road networks, a new traffic flow prediction method, the Enhanced Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network Encoder-Decoder Model (ESGCN-EDM), is proposed. The model achieves a significant enhancement in prediction accuracy through the introduction of the attention-based Personalized-enhanced Fusion Graph Convolutional Network (aPFGCN) and the Temporal Convolutional Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (TCBiL) module. The aPFGCN module effectively reduces the dimensionality of features and decreases model complexity to obtain the final node feature representation by personalizing the adjustment of node influence coefficients and applying Fourier transform and inverse transform techniques. Additionally, by incorporating an attention mechanism, it enhances the model’s ability to focus on important information and effectively captures the spatial topological relationships within the traffic network. The TCBiL module integrates 1D convolution with BiLSTM to form a unified temporal feature extraction module. The 1D convolution is utilized to extract local features from the time series, while the BiLSTM captures long-term dependencies within the time series. This allows for simultaneous feature extraction and temporal modeling, thereby enhancing the model’s efficiency and performance, and strengthening its ability to model time series. In the encoder part of the ESGCN-EDM, the aPFGCN is combined with the TCBiL to handle the spatiotemporal coupling interactions of the road network. The decoder part then performs multi-step predictions based on spatiotemporal sequences using the TCBiL and CNN, generating high-dimensional representations. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world road traffic datasets demonstrate that the ESGCN-EDM model consistently outperforms other benchmark models in 1-hour, 30-minute, and 15-minute traffic flow predictions. Specifically, on the PeMSD8 dataset, the model achieves reductions in MAE, RMSE, and SMAPE by 7.9%, 2.1%, and 16.9%, respectively, compared to the AMRGCN model for 1-hour predictions. Similarly, on the PeMSD4 dataset, the model reduces MAE, RMSE, and MAPE by 1.8%, 1.1%, and 3.0%, respectively. These results validate the efficacy of the proposed model and its ability to significantly enhance the accuracy of traffic flow forecasting.

Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0321858

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0321858

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