Spatial-temporal Attention Fusion for Traffic Speed Prediction

Abstract Accurate vehicle speed prediction is of great significance to the urban traffic intelligent control system. However, in terms of traffic speed prediction, the modules that integrate temporal and spatial features in the existing traffic speed prediction methods are effective in short-term prediction, but the medium-term or long-term prediction errors are relatively large. Aiming at this limitation, this paper proposes a traffic speed prediction method that combines attention and Spatial-temporal features, referred to as ASTCN. Specifically, unlike previous methods, ASTCN can use the temporal attention convolutional network (ATCN) to separately extract temporal features from the traffic speed features collected by each sensor, and use the spatial attention mechanism to extract spatial features and then perform spatial-temporal feature fusion. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that the proposed ASTCN model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.