An Attention-Driven Spatio-Temporal Deep Hybrid Neural Networks for Traffic Flow Prediction in Transportation Systems

In the context of rapidly growing city road networks, understanding complex traffic patterns and implementing effective safety monitoring through advanced Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS) has become increasingly challenging. This involves understanding spatial relationships and non-linear temporal associations. Accurately predicting traffic in such scenarios, particularly for long-term sequences, is challenging due to the complexity of the data. Traditional ways of predicting traffic flow use a single fixed graph structure based on location. This structure does not consider possible correlations and cannot fully capture long-term temporal relationships among traffic flow data, thereby limiting the system ability to ensure safety and reliability. To address this challenge, we propose a novel traffic prediction framework called Attention-based Spatio-temporal Multi-scale Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (ASTMGCNet). This study introduces a novel framework designed to improve prediction accuracy in dynamic urban traffic systems by effectively capturing complex spatio-temporal correlations through multi-scale feature extraction and attention mechanisms. ASTMGCNet records changing features of space and time by combining Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). Its design incorporates multi-scale feature extraction and dual attention mechanisms, effectively capturing informative patterns at different levels of detail. This strategic design allows ASTMGCNet to effectively capture complex spatio-temporal correlations within traffic sequences, enhancing prediction accuracy. We have tested this method on two different real-world datasets and found that ASTMGCNet predicts significantly better than other methods, demonstrating its potential to advance traffic flow prediction and improve safety and reliability in T-CPS applications.