KST-GCN: A Knowledge-Driven Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Forecasting

When considering the spatial and temporal features of traffic, capturing the impacts of various external factors on travel is an important step towards achieving accurate traffic forecasting. The impacts of external factors on the traffic flow have complex correlations. However, existing studies seldom consider external factors or neglecting the effect of the complex correlations among external factors on traffic. Intuitively, knowledge graphs can naturally describe these correlations, but knowledge graphs and traffic networks are essentially heterogeneous networks; thus, it is a challenging problem to integrate the information in both networks. We propose a knowledge representation-driven traffic forecasting method based on spatiotemporal graph convolutional networks. We first construct a city knowledge graph for traffic forecasting, then use KS-Cells to combine the information from the knowledge graph and the traffic network, and finally, capture the temporal changes of the traffic state with GRU. Testing on real-world datasets shows that the KST-GCN has higher accuracy than the baseline traffic forecasting methods at various prediction horizons. We provide a new way to integrate knowledge and the spatiotemporal features of data for traffic forecasting tasks. Without any loss of generality, the proposed method can also be extended to other spatiotemporal forecasting tasks.