Bidirectional Temporal Convolutional Graph Attention Networks for Key Node Identification in Traffic Monitoring

Efficient identification of key nodes is crucial to optimizing detector deployment and enhancing traffic monitoring in intelligent transportation systems. However, existing approaches often struggle to adapt to dynamic traffic variations, leading to suboptimal coverage and increased deployment costs. We propose bidirectional temporal convolutional graph attention networks (BTC-GATs) to address these limitations. This novel framework integrates bidirectional attention mechanisms to capture upstream and downstream dependencies, temporal convolutional networks for multiscale feature extraction, and graph attention networks for spatial information aggregation. BTC-GATs incorporates adaptive temporal modeling to capture nonlinear traffic dynamics, gradient-based variation analysis to quantify node influence, and a ranking mechanism that fuses attention coefficients with topological attributes to further enhance robustness and interoperability. In addition, a key node coverage study is conducted to examine the trade-off between accuracy and deployment efficiency. Extensive experiments on the California Highway PeMS04 dataset demonstrate that BTC-GATs outperforms benchmark methods in key node identification, offering superior accuracy and stability. Further analysis confirms its robustness under varying traffic conditions and initialization settings, highlighting its potential as a scalable, adaptive, and cost-effective solution for intelligent traffic monitoring. By facilitating efficient sensor placement, BTC-GATs contributes to improved data collection and congestion management in large-scale transportation networks.