An Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Traffic Flow Prediction Using Self-Attention and Multi-Graph Networks

Traffic flow prediction is a pivotal element in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) that provides significant opportunities for real-world applications. Capturing complex and dynamic spatio-temporal patterns within traffic data remains a significant challenge for traffic flow prediction. Different approaches to effectively modeling complex spatio-temporal correlations within traffic data have been proposed. These approaches often rely on a single model to capture temporal dependencies, which neglects the varying influences of different time periods on traffic flow. Additionally, these models frequently utilize either static or dynamic graphs to represent spatial dependencies, which limits their ability to address complex and overlapping spatial relationships. Moreover, some approaches struggle to fully capture spatio-temporal variations, leading to the exclusion of critical information and ultimately resulting in suboptimal prediction performance. Thus, this paper introduces the Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Attention-Based Multi-Model (ASTAM), an architecture designed to capture spatio-temporal dependencies within traffic data. The ASTAM employs multi-temporal gated convolution with multi-scale temporal input segments to model complex non-linear temporal correlations. It utilizes static and dynamic parallel multi-graphs to facilitate the modeling of complex spatial dependencies. Furthermore, this model incorporates a spatio-temporal self-attention mechanism to adaptively capture the dynamic and long-term spatio-temporal variations in traffic flow. Experiments conducted on four real-world datasets reveal that the proposed architecture outperformed 13 baseline approaches, achieving average reductions of 5.0% in MAE, 13.28% in RMSE, and 6.46% in MAPE across four datasets.