HD‐Net: A hybrid dynamic spatio‐temporal network for traffic flow prediction

Abstract

Accurately predicting traffic flow is crucial for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In recent years, many deep learning‐based prediction models have been widely applied in traffic flow prediction, and various spatio‐temporal networks have been proposed. However, most of the existing models follow a general technical route to extract the spatio‐temporal features, which lack the capacity of extracting the important historical information with the high spatial and temporal correlations dynamically and deeply. How to develop a well‐performance traffic flow prediction model for a complex transportation network is still facing some challenges. In this paper, a hybrid dynamic spatio‐temporal network (HD‐Net) for traffic flow prediction is proposed. In HD‐Net, the authors first extract the dynamic spatio‐temporal features using dynamic graph convolution and bidirectional gate recurrent uni (BiGRU). Subsequently, the authors extract the important features with high spatial and temporal correlations from the obtained dynamic spatio‐temporal features using an auto‐correlation mechanism from a local perspective, and self‐attention mechanism from a global perspective, respectively. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two real‐world traffic datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed HD‐Net outperforms the baselines in the field of capturing the dynamic and important spatio‐temporal features with high correlations.