An LSTM based Encoder-Decoder Model for Multi-Step Traffic Flow Prediction

Traffic flow prediction has been regarded as a key research problem in the intelligent transportation system. In this paper, we propose an encoder-decoder model with temporal attention mechanism for multi-step forward traffic flow prediction task, which uses LSTM as the encoder and decoder to learn the long dependencies features and nonlinear characteristics of multivariate traffic flow related time series data, and also introduces a temporal attention mechanism for more accurately traffic flow prediction. Through the real traffic flow dataset experiments, it has shown that the proposed model has better prediction ability than classic shallow learning and baseline deep learning models. And the predicted traffic flow value can be well matched with the ground truth value not only under short step forward prediction condition but also under longer step forward prediction condition, which validates that the proposed model is a good option for dealing with the realtime and forward-looking problems of traffic flow prediction task.