Dynamic graph convolutional network for long-term traffic flow prediction with reinforcement learning

Exploiting deep learning techniques for traffic flow prediction has become increasingly widespread. Most existing studies combine CNN or GCN with recurrent neural network to extract the spatio-temporal features in traffic networks. The traffic networks can be naturally modeled as graphs which are effective to capture the topology and spatial correlations among road links. The issue is that the traffic network is dynamic due to the continuous changing of the traffic environment. Compared with the static graph, the dynamic graph can better reflect the spatio-temporal features of the traffic network. However, in practical applications, due to the limited accuracy and timeliness of data, it is hard to generate graph structures through frequent statistical data. Therefore, it is necessary to design a method to overcome data defects in traffic flow prediction. In this paper, we propose a long-term traffic flow prediction method based on dynamic graphs. The traffic network is modeled by dynamic traffic flow probability graphs, and graph convolution is performed on the dynamic graphs to learn spatial features, which are then combined with LSTM units to learn temporal features. In particular, we further propose to use graph convolutional policy network based on reinforcement learning to generate dynamic graphs when the dynamic graphs are incomplete due to the data sparsity i sue. By testing our method on city-bike data in New York City, it demonstrates that our model can achieve stable and effective long-term predictions of traffic flow, and can reduce the impact of data defects on prediction results. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.