St-trafficnet: A spatial-temporal deep learning network for traffic forecasting

This paper presents a spatial-temporal deep learning network, termed ST-TrafficNet, for traffic flow forecasting. Recent deep learning methods highly relate accurate predetermined graph structure for the complex spatial dependencies of traffic flow, and ineffectively harvest high dimensional temporal features of the traffic flow. In this paper, a novel multi-diffusion convolution block constructed by an attentive diffusion convolution and bidirectional diffusion convolution is proposed, which is capable to extract precise potential spatial dependencies. Moreover, a stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) block is adopted to capture high-dimensional temporal features. By integrating the two blocks, the ST-TrafficNet can learn the spatial-temporal dependencies of intricate traffic data accurately. The performance of the ST-TrafficNet has been evaluated on two real-world benchmark datasets by comparing it with three commonly-used methods and seven state-of-the-art ones. The Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of the proposed method outperform not only the commonly-used methods, but also the state-of-the-art ones in 15 min, 30 min, and 60 min time-steps.