Traffic Speed Prediction Based on Time Classification in Combination With Spatial Graph Convolutional Network

With the advancement of automatic driving and smart city, it is critical to predict traffic information for traffic management, traffic planning, and traffic safety. When predicting traffic information, the spatial structure of the roads will also affect the traffic flow information, such as speed, occupancy rate, etc. The common method either merely focusing on the temporal feature without the considering the spatial structure, or the method of spatial feature extraction is only applicable to Euclidean structure, which does not apply to Non-Euclidean structure. This paper proposes a traffic speed prediction method based on time classification in combination with spatial Graph Convolutional Network. This method employs Gated Recurrent Unit to extract the temporal correlation and Graph Convolutional Network to extract the traffic network’s spatial structure. In consideration of the varying features of traffic speed on weekdays and weekends in the time dimension, time is divided into two types: weekdays and weekends. Since the structure of the road network will not change in the short term in actual process, the same network structure of spatial graph convolution can reasonably be shared in the spatial dimension after which the two sections are fused for training and prediction. Finally, this proposed method is compared to some baseline models to prove the performance. Generally speaking, this strategy produces more accurate prediction results on the PEMS_BAY and METR_LA data sets than the baseline models.