Traffic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network: A Deep Learning Framework for Network-Scale Traffic Learning and Forecasting

Traffic forecasting is a particularly challenging application of spatiotemporal forecasting, due to the time-varying traffic patterns and the complicated spatial dependencies on road networks. To address this challenge, we learn the traffic network as a graph and propose a novel deep learning framework, Traffic Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network (TGC-LSTM), to learn the interactions between roadways in the traffic network and forecast the network-wide traffic state. We define the traffic graph convolution based on the physical network topology. The relationship between the proposed traffic graph convolution and the spectral graph convolution is also discussed. An L1-norm on graph convolution weights and an L2-norm on graph convolution features are added to the model’s loss function to enhance the interpretability of the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms baseline methods on two real-world traffic state datasets. The visualization of the graph convolution weights indicates that the proposed framework can recognize the most influential road segments in real-world traffic networks.