Multimodal joint prediction of traffic spatial-temporal data with graph sparse attention mechanism and bidirectional temporal convolutional network

Traffic flow prediction plays a crucial role in the management and operation of urban transportation systems. While extensive research has been conducted on predictions for individual transportation modes, there is relatively limited research on joint prediction across different transportation modes. Furthermore, existing multimodal traffic joint modeling methods often lack flexibility in spatial-temporal feature extraction. To address these issues, we propose a method called Graph Sparse Attention Mechanism with Bidirectional Temporal Convolutional Network (GSABT) for multimodal traffic spatial-temporal joint prediction. First, we use a multimodal graph multiplied by self-attention weights to capture spatial local features, and then employ the Top-U sparse attention mechanism to obtain spatial global features. Second, we utilize a bidirectional temporal convolutional network to enhance the temporal feature correlation between the output and input data, and extract inter-modal and intra-modal temporal features through the share-unique module. Finally, we have designed a multimodal joint prediction framework that can be flexibly extended to both spatial and temporal dimensions. Extensive experiments conducted on three real datasets indicate that the proposed model consistently achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance.

Multi-View Fusion Neural Network for Traffic Demand Prediction

The extraction of spatial-temporal features is a crucial research in transportation studies, and current studies typically use a unified temporal modeling mechanism and fixed spatial graph for this purpose. However, the fixed spatial graph restricts the extraction of spatial features for similar but not directly connected nodes, while the unified temporal modeling mechanism overlooks the heterogeneity of temporal variation of different nodes. To address these challenges, a multi-view fusion neural network (MVFN) approach is proposed. In this approach, spatial local features are extracted through the use of a graph convolutional network (GCN), and spatial global features are extracted using a cosine re-weighting linear attention mechanism (CLA). The GCN and CLA are combined to create a graph-cosine module (GCM) for the extraction of overall spatial features. Additionally, the multi-channel separable temporal convolutional network (MSTCN) makes use of a multi-channel temporal convolutional network (MTCN) at each layer to extract unified temporal features, and a separable temporal convolutional network (STCN) to extract independent temporal features. Finally, the spatial-temporal feature data is input into the prediction layer to obtain the final result. The model has been validated on two traffic demand datasets and achieved the best prediction accuracy.