NodeTrans: A Graph Transfer Learning Approach for Traffic Prediction

Recently, deep learning methods have made great progress in traffic prediction, but their performance depends on a large amount of historical data. In reality, we may face the data scarcity issue. In this case, deep learning models fail to obtain satisfactory performance. Transfer learning is a promising approach to solve the data scarcity issue. However, existing transfer learning approaches in traffic prediction are mainly based on regular grid data, which is not suitable for the inherent graph data in the traffic network. Moreover, existing graph-based models can only capture shared traffic patterns in the road network, and how to learn node-specific patterns is also a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach to solve the traffic prediction with few data, which can transfer the knowledge learned from a data-rich source domain to a data-scarce target domain. First, a spatial-temporal graph neural network is proposed, which can capture the node-specific spatial-temporal traffic patterns of different road networks. Then, to improve the robustness of transfer, we design a pattern-based transfer strategy, where we leverage a clustering-based mechanism to distill common spatial-temporal patterns in the source domain, and use these knowledge to further improve the prediction performance of the target domain. Experiments on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach.

A Comprehensive Survey on Traffic Prediction

Traffic prediction plays an essential role in intelligent transportation system. Accurate traffic prediction can assist route planing, guide vehicle dispatching, and mitigate traffic congestion. This problem is challenging due to the complicated and dynamic spatio-temporal dependencies between different regions in the road network. Recently, a significant amount of research efforts have been devoted to this area, greatly advancing traffic prediction abilities. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey for traffic prediction. Specifically, we first summarize the existing traffic prediction methods, and give a taxonomy of them. Second, we list the common applications of traffic prediction and the state-of-the-art in these applications. Third, we collect and organize widely used public datasets in the existing literature. Furthermore, we give an evaluation by conducting extensive experiments to compare the performance of methods related to traffic demand and speed prediction respectively on two datasets. Finally, we discuss potential future directions.