Spatio-Temporal Joint Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Forecasting

Recent studies focus on formulating the traffic forecasting as a spatio-temporal graph modeling problem. They typically construct a static spatial graph at each time step and then connect each node with itself between adjacent time steps to construct the spatio-temporal graph. In such a graph, the correlations between different nodes at different time steps are not explicitly reflected, which may restrict the learning ability of graph neural networks. Meanwhile, those models ignore the dynamic spatio-temporal correlations among nodes as they use the same adjacency matrix at different time steps. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Joint Graph Convolutional Networks (STJGCN) for traffic forecasting over several time steps ahead on a road network. Specifically, we construct both pre-defined and adaptive spatio-temporal joint graphs (STJGs) between any two time steps, which represent comprehensive and dynamic spatio-temporal correlations. We further design dilated causal spatio-temporal joint graph convolution layers on STJG to capture the spatio-temporal dependencies from distinct perspectives with multiple ranges. A multi-range attention mechanism is proposed to aggregate the information of different ranges. Experiments on four public traffic datasets demonstrate that STJGCN is computationally efficient and outperforms 11 state-of-the-art baseline methods.