Predicting Origin-Destination Flow via Multi-Perspective Graph Convolutional Network

Predicting Origin-Destination (OD) flow is a crucial problem for intelligent transportation. However, it is extremely challenging because of three reasons: first, correlations exist between both origins and destinations; second, the correlations are dynamic across the time; at last, there are multiple correlations from different aspects. To the best of our knowledge, existing models for OD flow prediction cannot tackle all of these three issues simultaneously. We propose Multi-Perspective Graph Convolutional Networks (MPGCN) to capture the complex dependencies. Our proposed model first utilizes long short-term memory (LSTM) network to extract temporal features for each OD pair and then learns the spatial dependency of origins and destinations by a two-dimensional graph convolutional network. Furthermore, we design a dynamic graph together with two static graphs to capture the complicated spatial dependencies and use an average strategy to obtain the final predicted OD flow. We conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale and real-world datasets, which not only demonstrate our design philosophy but also validate the effectiveness of the proposed model.