Traffic Flow Prediction Based on Multi-Mode Spatial-Temporal Convolution of Mixed Hop Diffuse ODE

In recent years, traffic flow forecasting has attracted the great attention of many researchers with increasing traffic congestion in metropolises. As a hot topic in the field of intelligent city computing, traffic flow forecasting plays a vital role, since predicting the changes in traffic flow can timely alleviate traffic congestion and reduce the occurrence of accidents by vehicle scheduling. The most difficult challenges of traffic flow prediction are the temporal feature extraction and the spatial correlation extraction of nodes. At the same time, graph neural networks (GNNs) show an excellent ability in dealing with spatial dependence. Existing works typically make use of graph neural networks (GNNs) and temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) to model spatial and temporal dependencies respectively. However, how to extract as much valid information as possible from nodes is a challenge for GNNs. Therefore, we propose a multi-mode spatial-temporal convolution of mixed hop diffuse ODE (MHODE) for modeling traffic flow prediction. First, we design an adaptive spatial-temporal convolution module that combines Gate TCN and graph convolution to capture more short-term spatial-temporal dependencies and features. Secondly, we design a mixed hop diffuse ordinary differential equation(ODE) spatial-temporal convolution module to capture long-term spatial-temporal dependencies using the receptive field of the mixed hop diffuse ODE. Finally, we design a multi spatial-temporal fusion module to integrate the different spatial-temporal dependencies extracted from two different spatial-temporal convolutions. To capture more spatial-temporal features of traffic flow, we use the multi-mode spatial-temporal fusion module to get more abundant traffic features by considering short-term and long-term two different features. The experimental results on two public traffic datasets (METR-LA and PEMS-BAY) demonstrate that our proposed algorithm performs better than the existing methods in most of cases.