# IRN2Vec: A representation learning model for road network intersections by integrating geospatial attributes and travel behaviors

**Authors:** Xiaobo Yang

PMC · DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0344448 · PLOS One · 2026-03-13

## TL;DR

IRN2Vec is a model that improves road network analysis by combining geospatial and travel data to create better intersection representations.

## Contribution

IRN2Vec introduces a novel intersection-oriented representation learning model using geospatial and mobility features with multi-task learning.

## Key findings

- IRN2Vec outperforms UID, GCN, and GAT in traffic signal and pedestrian crossing classification tasks.
- The model reduces mean absolute error in travel time estimation by 12.2%–24.6%.
- It provides effective support for traffic state perception and road network optimization.

## Abstract

The structural characterization of road networks serves as a critical foundation for enabling high performance in intelligent transportation systems. This paper proposes IRN2Vec, an intersection-oriented representation learning model that generates discriminative road intersection embeddings by integrating geospatial attributes, semantic homogeneity, and mobility behavior features through the LEIRN framework. The model employs a shortest-path sampling strategy to construct training data and adopts a multi-task learning approach to jointly optimize three types of relationships: geographical proximity, label consistency, and categorical similarity. Experiments conducted on real-world road network data from San Francisco, Porto, and Tokyo demonstrate that IRN2Vec achieves average improvements in F1-Score of 31.6%/25.1%, 16.2%/8.6%, and 27.8%/20.2% over UID, GCN, and GAT models, respectively, in traffic signal classification and pedestrian crossing classification tasks. In travel time estimation, it reduces the mean absolute error (MAE) by 12.2%–24.6%. The findings provide effective feature support for traffic state perception and road network optimization.

## Full-text entities

- **Genes:** OSM (oncostatin M) [NCBI Gene 5008]
- **Diseases:** ITS (MESH:C537734)
- **Chemicals:** GCN (-), GAT (MESH:C020749)

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## Figures

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## References

20 references — full list in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12987413/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12987413