DeepTransport: Learning Spatial-Temporal Dependency for Traffic Condition Forecasting

Abstract: Predicting traffic conditions has been recently explored as a way to relieve traffic congestion. Several pioneering approaches have been proposed based on traffic observations of the target location as well as its adjacent regions, but they obtain somewhat limited accuracy due to a lack of mining road topology. To address the effect attenuation problem, we suggest taking into account the traffic of surrounding locations(wider than the adjacent range). We propose an end-to-end framework called DeepTransport, in which Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are utilized to obtain spatial-temporal traffic information within a transport network topology. In addition, an attention mechanism is introduced to align spatial and temporal information. Moreover, we constructed and released a real-world large traffic condition dataset with a 5-minute resolution. Our experiments on this dataset demonstrate our method captures the complex relationship in the temporal and spatial domains. It significantly outperforms traditional statistical methods and a state-of-the-art deep learning method.