A GATs-GAN framework for road traffic states forecasting

Short-term traffic states forecasting of road networks based on real-time data is an important component of intelligent transportation systems, especially advanced traffic management systems and traveller information systems. By considering the influence of both space and time dimensions, we proposed a novel GATs-GAN framework for the forecasting of traffic states. First, to capture spatial traffic relationships, the traffic topological graph network is set up based on the connection of traffic sections. Then, the first-order neighbours and high-order neighbours of traffic networks can be structured. Graph attention networks (GATs) are used to obtain the hidden features of input traffic data by training the attention between nodes in high-order neighbours. Based on two traffic networks in California and Seattle in the United States, we find that the GATs-GAN with high-order neighbours can satisfactorily estimate the traffic data and performs better than the baseline methods and comparative experiments.