ISTD-GCN: Iterative Spatial-Temporal Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Speed Forecasting

Abstract: Most of the existing algorithms for traffic speed forecasting split spatial features and temporal features to independent modules, and then associate information from both dimensions. However, features from spatial and temporal dimensions influence mutually, separated extractions isolate such dependencies, and might lead to inaccurate results. In this paper, we incorporate the perspective of information diffusion to model spatial features and temporal features synchronously. Intuitively, vertices not only diffuse information to the neighborhood but also to the subsequent state along with the temporal dimension. Therefore, we can model such heterogeneous spatial-temporal structures as a homogeneous process of diffusion. On this basis, we propose an Iterative Spatial-Temporal Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network (ISTD-GCN) to extract spatial and temporal features synchronously, thus dependencies between both dimensions can be better modeled. Experiments on two traffic datasets illustrate that our ISTD-GCN outperforms 10 baselines in traffic speed forecasting tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/Anonymous.