A Hybrid Traffic Speed Forecasting Approach Integrating Wavelet Transform and Motif-based Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract: Traffic forecasting is crucial for urban traffic management and guidance. However, existing methods rarely exploit the time-frequency properties of traffic speed observations, and often neglect the propagation of traffic flows from upstream to downstream road segments. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach that learns the spatio-temporal dependency in traffic flows and predicts short-term traffic speeds on a road network. Specifically, we employ wavelet transform to decompose raw traffic data into several components with different frequency sub-bands. A Motif-based Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (Motif-GCRNN) and Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) are used to train and predict low-frequency components and high-frequency components, respectively. In the Motif-GCRNN framework, we integrate Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) with local sub-graph structures - Motifs - to capture the spatial correlations among road segments, and apply Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to extract the short-term and periodic patterns in traffic speeds. Experiments on a traffic dataset collected in Chengdu, China, demonstrate that the proposed hybrid method outperforms six state-of-art prediction methods.