MSSTGCN: Multi-Head Self-Attention and Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Multi-Scale Traffic Flow Prediction

Accurate traffic flow prediction has a profound impact on modern traffic management. Traffic flow has complex spatial-temporal correlations and periodicity, which poses difficulties for precise prediction. To address this problem, a Multi-head Self-attention and Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (MSSTGCN) for multiscale traffic flow prediction is proposed. Firstly, to capture the hidden traffic periodicity of traffic flow, traffic flow is divided into three kinds of periods, including hourly, daily, and weekly data. Secondly, a graph attention residual layer is constructed to learn the global spatial features across regions. Local spatial-temporal dependence is captured by using a T-GCN module. Thirdly, a transformer layer is introduced to learn the long-term dependence in time. A position embedding mechanism is introduced to label position information for all traffic sequences. Thus, this multi-head self-attention mechanism can recognize the sequence order and allocate weights for different time nodes. Experimental results on four real-world datasets show that the MSSTGCN performs better than the baseline methods and can be successfully adapted to traffic prediction tasks.