Dynamic multi-scale spatial-temporal graph convolutional network for traffic flow prediction

This paper proposes a dynamic multi-scale spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (DS-STGCN) for traffic flow prediction. The network aims to comprehensively extract global and local dependencies in dynamic spatialtemporal data by inputting traffic network flow data to construct node feature graphs, topology graphs, and time slot feature graphs, capturing the complexity and dynamics of traffic flow. DS-STGCN interprets feature information of the traffic network from both spatial and temporal dimensions through dynamic multi-scale graph convolutional blocks. In the spatial dimension, these blocks use constraints at different levels to balance finegrained local features and extensive global features, revealing the intrinsic structure of traffic flow data. In the temporal dimension, these blocks jointly learn with temporal convolutional blocks to capture multifrequency time patterns and handle long sequence data, effectively extracting potential dependencies of time series. Furthermore, DS-STGCN effectively models the changing spatial-temporal relationships in road network flow by constructing dynamically adaptive updated adjacency tensors, generating dynamic graph structures to address the challenge of changing spatial-temporal relationships in the transportation system. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms other competing methods on five real traffic datasets (PEMS03, PEMS04, PEMS07, PEMS08 and METR-LA).