Generating Large-Scale Origin–Destination Matrix via Progressive Growing Generative Adversarial Networks Model

The origin–destination (OD) matrix describes traffic flow information between regions. It is a critical input for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, obtaining the OD matrix remains challenging due to high costs and privacy concerns. Synthetic data, which have the same statistical distribution of real data, help address privacy issues and data scarcity. Based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), OD matrix generation models, which can effectively generate a synthetic OD matrix, help to address the challenge of obtaining OD matrix data in ITS research. However, existing OD matrix generation methods can only handle with tens of nodes. To address this challenge, this study proposes the Origin–Destination Progressive Growing Generative Adversarial Networks (OD-PGGAN) for large-scale OD matrix generation task which adapt the PGGAN architecture. OD-PGGAN adopts a progressive learning strategy to gradually learn the structure of the OD matrix from a coarse to fine scale. OD-PGGAN utilizes multi-scale generators and discriminators to perform generation and discrimination tasks at different spatial resolutions. OD-PGGAN introduces a geography-based upsampling and downsampling algorithm to maintain the geographical significance of the OD matrix during spatial resolution transformations. The results demonstrate that the proposed OD-PGGAN can generate a large-scale synthetic OD matrix with 1024 nodes that have the same distribution as the real sample and outperforms two classical methods. The OD-PGGAN can effectively provide reliable synthetic data for transportation applications.