One Size Fits All: A Unified Traffic Predictor for Capturing the Essential Spatial–Temporal Dependency

Traffic prediction is a keystone for building smart cities in the new era and has found wide applications in traffic scheduling and management, environment policy making, public safety, and so on. Instead of creating a traffic predictor for each city, this article focuses on designing a unified network model that could be directly applied for traffic prediction in any city, by learning the essential spatial–temporal dependencies, i.e., the mutual relationship between traffic and the corresponding fine-grained road network. To achieve this goal, this article proposes a joint knowledge-and data-driven mechanism that novelly divides dependencies into three kinds of correlations, i.e., road segment, intra-intersection, and inter-intersection correlation, which capture the microcosmic, middle, and macroscopic dependencies between traffic and the road network, respectively. Specifically, we first construct traffic datasets that could cover all road segments from real-world trajectory datasets, which makes it possible to model the whole road network as a graph, with the help of fine-grained road topology. Then, we propose meta road segment learner, connection-aware spatial–temporal graph convolutional network (GCN), and multiscale residual networks for capturing the microcosmic, middle, and macroscopic dependencies, respectively. Our experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method could: 1) achieve better prediction accuracy compared with several approaches and 2) capture the mutual relationship between traffic and the fine-grained road network since our model trained only using data from the source city achieves good performance when it is directly applied for traffic prediction in the target city, without any fine-tuning. The codes will be made publicly available.