Attention Based Spatial-Temporal GCN with Kalman filter for Traffic Flow Prediction

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are becoming increasingly important as traditional traffic management systems struggle to handle the rapid growth of vehicles on the road. Accurate traffic prediction is a critical component of ITS, as it can help improve traffic management, avoid congested roads, and allocate resources more efficiently for connected vehicles. However, modeling traffic in a large and interconnected road network is challenging because of its complex spatio-temporal data. While classical statistics and machine learning methods have been used for traffic prediction, they have limited ability to handle complex traffic data, leading to unsatisfactory accuracy. In recent years, deep learning methods, such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have shown superior capabilities for traffic prediction. However, most CNN-based models are built for Euclidean grid-structured data, while traffic road network data are irregular and better formatted as graph-structured data. Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs) have emerged to extend convolution operations to more general graph structured data. This paper reviews recent developments in traffic prediction using deep learning, focusing on GCNs as a promising technique for handling irregular, graph-structured traffic data. We also propose a novel GCN-based method that leverages attention mechanisms to capture both local and long-range dependencies in traffic data with Kalman Filter, and we demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on real-world datasets where the model achieved around 5% higher accuracy compared to the original model.