Multi-Grained Temporal-Spatial Graph Learning for Stable Traffic Flow Forecasting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-grained graph learning framework that effectively captures both global and local temporal-spatial patterns for more robust and accurate traffic flow forecasting in complex urban environments.

Contribution

The proposed method combines a graph transformer encoder with graph convolution using a gated fusion unit, enhancing the modeling of global and local patterns and improving robustness.

Findings

Outperforms baseline models on real-world traffic datasets

Demonstrates strong representation of global and local temporal-spatial relations

Achieves better forecasting accuracy and robustness

Abstract

Time-evolving traffic flow forecasting are playing a vital role in intelligent transportation systems and smart cities. However, the dynamic traffic flow forecasting is a highly nonlinear problem with complex temporal-spatial dependencies. Although the existing methods has provided great contributions to mine the temporal-spatial patterns in the complex traffic networks, they fail to encode the globally temporal-spatial patterns and are prone to overfit on the pre-defined geographical correlations, and thus hinder the model's robustness on the complex traffic environment. To tackle this issue, in this work, we proposed a multi-grained temporal-spatial graph learning framework to adaptively augment the globally temporal-spatial patterns obtained from a crafted graph transformer encoder with the local patterns from the graph convolution by a crafted gated fusion unit with residual connection techniques. Under these circumstances, our proposed model can mine the hidden global temporal-spatial relations between each monitor stations and balance the relative importance of local and global temporal-spatial patterns. Experiment results demonstrate the strong representation capability of our proposed method and our model consistently outperforms other strong baselines on various real-world traffic networks.