Dynamic multi-scale spatial-temporal graph convolutional network for traffic flow prediction

This paper proposes a dynamic multi-scale spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (DS-STGCN) for traffic flow prediction . The network aims to comprehensively extract global and local dependencies in dynamic spatial-temporal data by inputting traffic network flow data to construct node feature graphs, topology graphs , and time slot feature graphs, capturing the complexity and dynamics of traffic flow. DS-STGCN interprets feature information of the traffic network from both spatial and temporal dimensions through dynamic multi-scale graph convolutional blocks. In the spatial dimension, these blocks use constraints at different levels to balance fine-grained local features and extensive global features, revealing the intrinsic structure of traffic flow data. In the temporal dimension, these blocks jointly learn with temporal convolutional blocks to capture multi-frequency time patterns and handle long sequence data, effectively extracting potential dependencies of time series . Furthermore, DS-STGCN effectively models the changing spatial-temporal relationships in road network flow by constructing dynamically adaptive updated adjacency tensors, generating dynamic graph structures to address the challenge of changing spatial-temporal relationships in the transportation system. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms other competing methods on five real traffic datasets (PEMS03, PEMS04, PEMS07, PEMS08 and METR-LA).