STHSGCN: Spatial-temporal heterogeneous and synchronous graph convolution network for traffic flow prediction

Nowadays, as a crucial component of intelligent transportation systems, traffic flow prediction has received extensive concern. However, most of the existing studies extracted spatial-temporal features with modules that do not differentiate with time and space, and failed to consider spatial-temporal heterogeneities. Furthermore, although previous works have achieved synchronous modeling of spatial-temporal dependencies, the consideration of temporal causality is still lacking in their graph structures. To address these shortcomings, a spatial-temporal heterogeneous and synchronous graph convolution network (STHSGCN) is proposed for traffic flow prediction. To be specific, separate dilated causal spatial-temporal synchronous graph convolutional networks (DCSTSGCNs) for various node clusters are designed to reflect spatial heterogeneity, different dilated causal spatial-temporal synchronous graph convolutional modules (DCSTSGCMs) for diverse time steps are deployed to take account of temporal heterogeneity. In addition, causal spatial-temporal synchronous graph (CSTSG) is proposed to capture temporal causality in spatial-temporal synchronous learning. We further conducted extensive experiments on four real-world datasets, and the results verified the consistent superiority of our proposed approach compared with various existing baselines.