TrafficStream: A Streaming Traffic Flow Forecasting Framework Based on Graph Neural Networks and Continual Learning

TL;DR

TrafficStream is a novel framework that combines graph neural networks and continual learning to improve long-term traffic flow forecasting on evolving and expanding traffic networks.

Contribution

It introduces a traffic pattern fusion method and a JS-divergence-based algorithm for pattern mining, along with continual learning strategies for efficient model updating.

Findings

High accuracy in long-term traffic prediction

Effective learning on streaming, evolving traffic networks

Demonstrated efficiency and robustness on a new streaming dataset

Abstract

With the rapid growth of traffic sensors deployed, a massive amount of traffic flow data are collected, revealing the long-term evolution of traffic flows and the gradual expansion of traffic networks. How to accurately forecasting these traffic flow attracts the attention of researchers as it is of great significance for improving the efficiency of transportation systems. However, existing methods mainly focus on the spatial-temporal correlation of static networks, leaving the problem of efficiently learning models on networks with expansion and evolving patterns less studied. To tackle this problem, we propose a Streaming Traffic Flow Forecasting Framework, TrafficStream, based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Continual Learning (CL), achieving accurate predictions and high efficiency. Firstly, we design a traffic pattern fusion method, cleverly integrating the new patterns that emerged during the long-term period into the model. A JS-divergence-based algorithm is proposed to mine new traffic patterns. Secondly, we introduce CL to consolidate the knowledge learned previously and transfer them to the current model. Specifically, we adopt two strategies: historical data replay and parameter smoothing. We construct a streaming traffic dataset to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our model. Extensive experiments demonstrate its excellent potential to extract traffic patterns with high efficiency on long-term streaming network scene. The source code is available at https://github.com/AprLie/TrafficStream.