STCGAT: Spatial-temporal causal networks for complex urban road traffic flow prediction

Traffic forecasting is an essential component of intelligent transportation systems. However, traffic data are highly nonlinear and have complex spatial correlations between road nodes. Therefore, it is incredibly challenging to dig deeper into the underlying Spatial-temporal relationships from the complex traffic data. Existing approaches usually use fixed traffic road network topology maps and independent time series modules to capture Spatial-temporal correlations, ignoring the dynamic changes of traffic road networks and the inherent temporal causal relationships between traffic events. Therefore, a new prediction model is proposed in this study. The model dynamically captures the spatial dependence of the traffic network through a Graph Attention Network(GAT) and then analyzes the causal relationship of the traffic data using our proposed Causal Temporal Convolutional Network(CTCN) to obtain the overall temporal dependence. We conducted extensive comparison experiments with other traffic prediction methods on two real traffic datasets to evaluate the model's prediction performance. Compared with the best experimental results of different prediction methods, the prediction performance of our approach is improved by more than 50%. You can get our source code and data through https://github.com/zhangshqii/STCGAT.