Title
Robust Traffic Prediction From Spatial–Temporal Data Based on Conditional Distribution Learning
Abstract
Traffic prediction based on massive speed data collected from traffic sensors plays an important role in traffic management. However, it is still challenging to obtain satisfactory performance due to the complex and dynamic spatial-temporal correlations among the data. Recently, many research works have demonstrated the effectiveness of graph neural networks (GNNs) for spatial–temporal modeling. However, such models are restricted by conditional distribution during training, and may not perform well when the target is outside the primary region of interest in the distribution. In this article, we address this problem with a stagewise learning mechanism, in which we redefine speed prediction as a conditional distribution learning followed by speed regression. We first perform a conditional distribution learning for each observed speed class, and then obtain speed prediction by optimizing regression learning, based on the learned conditional distribution. To effectively learn the conditional distribution, we introduce a mean–residue loss, consisting of two parts: 1) a mean loss, which penalizes the differences between the mean of the estimated conditional distribution and the ground truth and 2) a residue loss, which penalizes residue errors of the long tails in the distribution. To optimize the subsequent regression based on distribution information, we combine the mean absolute error (MAE) as another part of the loss function. We also incorporate a GNN-based architecture with our proposed learning mechanism. Mean–residue loss is employed to supervise the hidden speed representation in the network at each time interval, followed by a shared layer to recalibrate the hidden temporal dependencies in the conditional distribution. The experimental results based on three public traffic datasets have demonstrated that the effectiveness of the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TCYB.2021.3131285
IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Neural Networks, Computer
Journal
52
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
12
2168-2267
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
19
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zeng Zeng116430.44
Zhao Wei22320.57
Peisheng Qian300.34
Yingjie Zhou441.73
Ziyuan Zhao5107.27
Chen Cen616225.61
Cuntai Guan71298124.69