Temporal super-resolution traffic flow forecasting via continuous-time network dynamics

Traffic flow forecasting is a critical task for intelligent transportation systems. However, the existed forecasting can only be conducted at certain time steps, because the data are discretely collected at these time steps. In contrast, traffic flow evolves in real time via a continuous manner in real world. Therefore, an ideal forecasting paradigm should be performed at arbitrary time steps instead of only at these certain time steps. Considering the forecasting time steps will no longer be restricted by these time steps, we call such paradigm as temporal super-resolution forecasting. In this paper, we incorporate the idea of neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs) to handle the problem, modeling the change rate of traffic flow on the urban road. Therefore, due to the continuous nature of ordinary differential equations, the traffic flow at arbitrary time steps can be forecasted by performing definite integral for the change rate. The urban road is usually regarded as a network, and the change rate of which can be described by continuous-time network dynamics, we parameterize the network dynamics of the traffic flow to quantify the change rate. On these foundations, we propose spatial-temporal continuous dynamics network to complete the temporal super-resolution forecasting task. Extensive experiments on public traffic flow datasets illustrate that our model can achieve high accuracy on temporal super-resolution forecasting, while ensuring its performance on conventional experimental settings at these certain time steps.