TAP: Traffic Accident Profiling via Multi-Task Spatio-Temporal Graph Representation Learning

Predicting traffic accidents can help traffic management departments respond to sudden traffic situations promptly, improve drivers’ vigilance, and reduce losses caused by traffic accidents. However, the causality of traffic accidents is complex and difficult to analyze. Most existing traffic accident prediction methods do not consider the dynamic spatio-temporal correlation of traffic data, which leads to unsatisfactory prediction accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a multi-task learning framework (TAP) based on the Spatio-temporal Variational Graph Auto-Encoders (ST-VGAE) for traffic accident profiling. We firstly capture the dynamic spatio-temporal correlation of traffic conditions through a spatio-temporal graph convolutional encoder and embed it as a low-latitude vector. Then, we use a multi-task learning scheme to combine external factors to generate the traffic accident profiling. Furthermore, we propose a traffic accident profiling application framework based on edge computing. This method increases the speed of calculation by offloading the calculation of traffic accident profiling to edge nodes. Finally, the experimental results on real datasets demonstrate that TAP outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines.