A multi‐attention dynamic graph convolution network with cost‐sensitive learning approach to road‐level and minute‐level traffic accident prediction

Abstract

Traffic accident prediction on road levels and minute levels plays an important role in optimizing public safety and improving traffic infrastructure. However, there are still some challenges in this work. Firstly, the dynamic factors (e.g. traffic flow) affecting traffic accidents make the road network have dynamic spatio‐temporal dependency, which leads to biased prediction results. Secondly, the occurrence of traffic accidents is a small probability event, which brings about zero‐inflation problem. To address aforementioned problems, the authors propose a Multi‐Attention Dynamic Graph Convolution Network with Cost Sensitive Learning approach (MADGCN). Specifically, in the spatial dimension, MADGCN calculates the attention scores of different types of dynamic factors through attention mechanism to simulate the different influence degrees of different factors, and models dynamic inter‐road spatial correlation through Graph Convolution Network (GCN). In the temporal aspect, MADGCN adaptively models the dynamic temporal correlations through self‐attention blocks. In addition, MADGCN improves the loss function based on cost‐sensitive learning strategy to increase the cost of false classification of positive samples, so as to accurately mine sparse positive samples. Experimental results on two real‐world traffic accident datasets demonstrate the superiority of MADGCN. Compared with the existing state‐of‐the‐art methods, F1‐score of MADGCN on two real‐world traffic accident datasets is improved by 11.61% and 9.15%, respectively.