An Enhanced Motif Graph Clustering-Based Deep Learning Approach for Traffic Forecasting

Traffic speed prediction is among the key problems in intelligent transportation system (ITS). Traffic patterns with complex spatial dependency make accurate prediction on traffic networks a challenging task. Recently, a deep learning approach named Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (STGCN) has achieved state-of-the-art results in traffic speed prediction by jointly exploiting the spatial and temporal features of traffic data. Nonetheless, applying STGCN to large-scale urban traffic network may develop degenerated results, which is due to redundant spatial information engaging in graph convolution. In this work, we propose a motif-based graph-clustering approach to apply STGCN to large-scale traffic networks. By using graph-clustering, we partition a large urban traffic network into smaller clusters to prompt the learning effect of graph convolution. The proposed approach is evaluated on two real-world datasets and is compared with its variants and baseline methods. The results show that graph-clustering approaches generally outperform the other methods, and the proposed approach obtains the best performance.