A Traffic Flow Forecasting Method Regarding Traffic Network as a Digraph

Abstract

Traffic congestion has become a major problem restricting the development of major cities. ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) can record the state of traffic and predict the future traffic state, then reasonably optimize the travel scheme, so as to achieve the purpose of alleviating traffic congestion. Meanwhile, traffic flow prediction can provide data support for ITS, so many researchers have done a lot of research on traffic flow prediction. Many researchers take the traffic network as an undirected graph, and use the GCN (Graph Convolution Network) model to study the traffic flow prediction, and have achieved good prediction results. However, the traffic network is directed, and the traffic network is regarded as an undirected graph, which loses the direction information of the road network. Therefore, this inspires us to propose a graph convolution operator DGCN (Directed GCN), which can make full use of the in degree and out degree information of each station in the traffic network. The experimental results show that the graph convolution neural network based on this operator has better prediction accuracy than the state-of-the-art models.