An Adaptive Framework for Traffic Congestion Prediction using Deep Learning

Aims and background: Congestion on China's roads has worsened in recent years due to the country's rapid economic development, rising urban population, rising private car ownership, inequitable traffic flow distribution, and growing local congestion. As cities expand, traffic congestion has become an unavoidable nuisance that endangers the safety and progress of its residents. Improving the utilization rate of municipal transportation facilities and relieving traffic congestion depend on a thorough and accurate identification of the current state of road traffic and necessitate anticipating road congestion in the city. Methodology: In this research, we suggest using a deep spatial and temporal graph convolutional network (DSGCN) to forecast the current state of traffic congestion. To begin, we grid out the transportation system to create individual regions for analysis. In this work, we abstract the grid region centers as nodes, and we use an adjacency matrix to signify the dynamic correlations between the nodes. Results and Discussion: The spatial correlation between regions is then captured utilizing a Graph Convolutional-neural-network (GCNN), while the temporal correlation is captured using a two-layer long and short-term feature model (DSTM). Conclusion: Finally, testing on real PeMS datasets shows that the DSGCN has superior performance than other baseline models and provides more accurate traffic congestion prediction.