Multicomponent Spatial-Temporal Graph Attention Convolution Networks for Traffic Prediction with Spatially Sparse Data

Predicting traffic data on traffic networks is essential to transportation management. It is a challenging task due to the complicated spatial-temporal dependency. The latest studies mainly focus on capturing temporal and spatial dependencies with spatially dense traffic data. However, when traffic data become spatially sparse, existing methods cannot capture sufficient spatial correlation information and thus fail to learn the temporal periodicity sufficiently. To address these issues, we propose a novel deep learning framework, Multi-component Spatial-Temporal Graph Attention Convolutional Networks (MSTGACN), for traffic prediction, and we successfully apply it to predicting traffic flow and speed with spatially sparse data. MSTGACN mainly consists of three independent components to model three types of periodic information. Each component in MSTGACN combines dilated causal convolution, graph convolution layer, and the weight-shared graph attention layer. Experimental results on three real-world traffic datasets, METR-LA, PeMS-BAY, and PeMSD7-sparse, demonstrate the superior performance of our method in the case of spatially sparse data.