Dynamic Adaptive and Adversarial Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Forecasting

Traffic forecasting is challenging due to dynamic and complicated spatial-temporal dependencies. However, existing methods still suffer from two critical limitations. Firstly, many approaches typically utilize static pre-defined or adaptively learned spatial graphs to capture dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies in the traffic system, which limits the flexibility and only captures shared patterns for the whole time, thus leading to sub-optimal performance. In addition, most approaches individually and independently consider the absolute error between ground truth and predictions at each time step, which fails to maintain the global properties and statistics of time series as a whole and results in trend discrepancy between ground truth and predictions. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Dynamic Adaptive and Adversarial Graph Convolutional Network (DAAGCN), which combines Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for traffic forecasting. Specifically, DAAGCN leverages a universal paradigm with a gate module to integrate time-varying embeddings with node embeddings to generate dynamic adaptive graphs for inferring spatial-temporal dependencies at each time step. Then, two discriminators are designed to maintain the consistency of the global properties and statistics of predicted time series with ground truth at the sequence and graph levels. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets manifest that DAAGCN outperforms the state-of-the-art by average 5.05%, 3.80%, and 5.27%, in terms of MAE, RMSE, and MAPE, meanwhile, speeds up convergence up to 9 times. Code is available at https://github.com/juyongjiang/DAAGCN.