Traffic congestion event prediction is an important yet challenging task in intelligent transportation systems. Many existing works about traffic prediction integrate various temporal encoders and graph convolution networks (GCNs), called spatio-temporal graph-based neural networks, which focus on predicting dense variables such as flow, speed and demand in time snapshots, but they can hardly forecast the traffic congestion events that are sparsely distributed on the continuous time axis. In recent years, neural point process (NPP) has emerged as an appropriate framework for event prediction in continuous time scenarios. However, most conventional works about NPP cannot model the complex spatio-temporal dependencies and congestion evolution patterns. To address these limitations, we propose a spatio-temporal graph neural point process framework, named STGNPP for traffic congestion event prediction. Specifically, we first design the spatio-temporal graph learning module to fully capture the long-range spatio-temporal dependencies from the historical traffic state data along with the road network. The extracted spatio-temporal hidden representation and congestion event information are then fed into a continuous gated recurrent unit to model the congestion evolution patterns. In particular, to fully exploit the periodic information, we also improve the intensity function calculation of the point process with a periodic gated mechanism. Finally, our model simultaneously predicts the occurrence time and duration of the next congestion. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in comparison to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Traffic congestion has a negative impact on our daily life. Predicting the trend of traffic congestion can provide a valuable guideline to address such problems. Most existing approaches focus on the tasks of predicting traffic volume or traffic speed, which do not effectively address the challenges of traffic congestion prediction. First, traffic congestion exhibits daily and weekly temporal patterns, but these patterns are not strictly the same, which indicates complicated long-term periodicity. Second, traffic congestion sparsely distributes over different periods of time, which leads to complex short-term and mid-term temporal dependencies. Third, since traffic congestion will propagate to adjacent road segments over time, it exhibits complex spatio-temporal correlations. To address them, we propose a periodic shift and event-aware spatio-temporal graph convolutional network for traffic congestion prediction. Specifically, we propose to capture the differences and similarities of long-term periodic temporal patterns to handle the complicated long-term periodicity. To effectively capture short-term and mid-term temporal dependencies, we regard a continuous time sequence of the congested condition as a traffic congestion event, and then adopt the widely-used long short-term memory model to learn the sequential dependencies of traffic congestion events. Finally, we integrate the graph convolutional network into the modeling of temporal dependencies to capture the complex spatio-temporal correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model. In addition, we deploy our model in production at Amap, and it achieves great performance improvement in terms of the F1-score compared to the production baseline. This confirms that our model is a practical solution for real-world congestion prediction services.

Travel time estimation (TTE) is a crucial task in intelligent transportation systems, which has been widely used in navigation and route planning. In recent years, several deep learning frameworks have been proposed to capture the dynamic features of road segments or intersections for travel time estimation. However, most existing works do not consider the joint features of the intersections and road segments. Moreover, most deep neural networks for TTE are designed based on empirical knowledge. Since the independent and joint features of intersections and road segments commonly vary with different datasets, the empirical deterministic neural architectures have limited adaptability to different scenarios. To tackle the above problems, we propose a novel automated deep learning framework, namely Automated Spatio-Temporal Dual Graph Convolutional Networks (Auto-STDGCN), for travel time estimation. Specifically, we propose to construct the node-wise graph and edge-wise graph to characterize the spatio-temporal features of intersections and road segments, respectively. In order to capture the joint spatio-temporal correlations of the dual graphs, a hierarchical neural architecture search approach is introduced, whose search space is composed of internal and external search space. In the internal search space, spatial graph convolution and temporal convolution operations are adopted to capture the respective spatio-temporal correlations of the dual graphs. Further, we design the external search space including the node-wise and edge-wise graph convolution operations from the internal architecture search to capture the interaction patterns between the intersections and road segments. We evaluate our proposed model Auto-STDGCN on three real-world datasets, which demonstrates that our model is significantly superior to the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we also conduct case studies to visualize and explain the neural architectures learned by our model.

Accurate traffic prediction is a challenging task in intelligent transportation systems because of the complex spatio-temporal dependencies in transportation networks. Many existing works utilize sophisticated temporal modeling approaches to incorporate with graph convolution networks (GCNs) for capturing short-term and long-term spatio-temporal dependencies. However, these separated modules with complicated designs could restrict effectiveness and efficiency of spatio-temporal representation learning. Furthermore, most previous works adopt the fixed graph construction methods to characterize the global spatio-temporal relations, which limits the learning capability of the model for different time periods and even different data scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose an automated dilated spatio-temporal synchronous graph network, named Auto-DSTSGN for traffic prediction. Specifically, we design an automated dilated spatio-temporal synchronous graph (Auto-DSTSG) module to capture the short-term and long-term spatio-temporal correlations by stacking deeper layers with dilation factors in an increasing order. Further, we propose a graph structure search approach to automatically construct the spatio-temporal synchronous graph that can adapt to different data scenarios. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model can achieve about 10% improvements compared with the state-of-art methods. Source codes are available athttps://github.com/jinguangyin/Auto-DSTSGN.

Traffic prediction is the cornerstone of intelligent transportation system. Accurate traffic forecasting is essential for the applications of smart cities, i.e., intelligent traffic management and urban planning. Although various methods are proposed for spatio-temporal modeling, they ignore the dynamic characteristics of correlations among locations on road network. Meanwhile, most Recurrent Neural Network based works are not efficient enough due to their recurrent operations. Additionally, there is a severe lack of fair comparison among different methods on the same datasets. To address the above challenges, in this article, we propose a novel traffic prediction framework, named Dynamic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (DGCRN). In DGCRN, hyper-networks are designed to leverage and extract dynamic characteristics from node attributes, while the parameters of dynamic filters are generated at each time step. We filter the node embeddings and then use them to generate dynamic graph, which is integrated with pre-defined static graph. As far as we know, we are first to employ a generation method to model fine topology of dynamic graph at each time step. Furthermore, to enhance efficiency and performance, we employ a training strategy for DGCRN by restricting the iteration number of decoder during forward and backward propagation. Finally, a reproducible standardized benchmark and a brand new representative traffic dataset are opened for fair comparison and further research. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms 15 baselines consistently. Source codes are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/Traffic-Benchmark .

Traffic prediction plays an important role in many intelligent transportation systems. Many existing works design static neural network architecture to capture complex spatio-temporal correlations, which is hard to adapt to different datasets. Although recent neural architecture search approaches have addressed this problem, it still adopts a coarse-grained search with pre-defined and fixed components in the search space for spatio-temporal modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel neural architecture search framework, entitled AutoSTS, for automated spatio-temporal synchronous modeling in traffic prediction. To be specific, we design a graph neural network (GNN) based architecture search module to capture localized spatio-temporal correlations, where multiple graphs built from different perspectives are jointly utilized to find a better message passing way for mining such correlations. Further, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based architecture search module to capture temporal dependencies with various ranges, where gated temporal convolutions with different kernel sizes and convolution types are designed in search space. Extensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that our model can achieve 4%-10% improvements compared with other methods.

It is essential to predict crowd flow precisely in a city, which is practically partitioned into irregular regions based on road networks and functionality. However, prior works mainly focus on grid-based crowd flow prediction, where a city is divided into many regular grids. Although Convolutional Neural Netwok (CNN) is powerful to capture spatial dependence from grid-based Euclidean data, it fails to tackle non-Euclidean data, which reflect the correlations among irregular regions. Besides, prior works fail to jointly capture the hierarchical spatio-temporal dependence from both regular and irregular regions. Finally, the correlations among regions are time-varying and functionality-related. However, the combination of dynamic and semantic attributes of regions are ignored by related works. To address the above challenges, in this article, we propose a novel model to tackle the flow prediction task for irregular regions. First, we employ CNN and Graph Neural Network (GNN) to capture micro and macro spatial dependence among grid-based regions and irregular regions, respectively. Further, we think highly of the dynamic inter-region correlations and propose a location-aware and time-aware graph attention mechanism named Semantic Graph Attention Network (Semantic-GAT), based on dynamic node attribute embedding and multi-view graph reconstruction. Extensive experimental results based on two real-life datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms 10 baselines by reducing the prediction error around 8%.

We propose a novel automated deep learning framework, namely Automated Spatio-Temporal Dual Graph Convolutional Networks (Auto-STDGCN), for travel time estimation. Specifically, a hierarchical neural architecture search approach is introduced to capture the joint spatio-temporal correlations of intersections and road segments, whose search space is composed of internal and external search space. In the internal search space, spatial graph convolution and temporal convolution operations are adopted to capture the spatio-temporal correlations of the dual graphs. In the external search space, the node-wise and edge-wise graph convolution operations from the internal architecture search are built to capture the interaction patterns between the intersections and road segments. We conduct several experiments on two real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that Auto-STDGCN is significantly superior to the state-of-art methods.