Attention-based spatio-temporal graph convolutional network considering external factors for multi-step traffic flow prediction

Traffic flow prediction is an important part of the intelligent transportation system. Accurate multi-step traffic flow prediction plays an important role in improving the operational efficiency of the traffic network. Since traffic flow data has complex spatio-temporal correlation and non-linearity, existing prediction methods are mainly accomplished through a combination of a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and a recurrent neural network. The combination strategy has an excellent performance in traffic prediction tasks. However, multi-step prediction error accumulates with the predicted step size. Some scholars use multiple sampling sequences to achieve more accurate prediction results. But it requires high hardware conditions and multiplied training time. Considering the spatiotemporal correlation of traffic flow and influence of external factors, we propose an Attention Based Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network considering External Factors (ABSTGCN-EF) for multi-step traffic flow prediction. This model models the traffic flow as diffusion on a digraph and extracts the spatial characteristics of traffic flow through GCN. We add meaningful time-slots attention to the encoder-decoder to form an Attention Encoder Network (AEN) to handle temporal correlation. The attention vector is used as a competitive choice to draw the correlation between predicted states and historical states. We considered the impact of three external factors (daytime, weekdays, and traffic accident markers) on the traffic flow prediction tasks. Experiments on two public data sets show that it makes sense to consider external factors. The prediction performance of our ABSTGCN-EF model achieves 7.2%-8.7% higher than the state-of-the-art baselines.