A Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Network with hierarchical attention for predicting traffic flow in urban mobility

Abstract

Accurate prediction of traffic flow is essential for optimizing transportation resource allocation and enhancing urban mobility efficiency. However, traffic data generated daily are vast and complex, involving dynamic and intricate changes in the traffic road network and traffic flow. Therefore, real-time and accurate prediction of traffic flow is a challenging task that requires modeling the intricate spatial–temporal dynamics of traffic data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for traffic flow prediction, based on a Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Network with hierarchical attention. First, we design a novel encoder–decoder with multi-independent channels to capture traffic flow information from different time scales and diverse temporal dependencies. Second, we employ a coupled graph convolution network with residual graph attention to dynamically learn the varying spatial features among and within traffic stations. Third, we utilize channel attention to fuse the multi-scale spatial–temporal dependencies and accurately predict traffic flow. We evaluate the proposed approach on multiple benchmark datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in terms of various metrics.