Spatial-Temporal Attention Mechanism and Graph Convolutional Networks for Destination Prediction

Urban transportation destination prediction is a crucial issue in the area of intelligent transportation, such as urban traffic planning and traffic congestion control. The spatial structure of the road network has high nonlinearity and complexity, and also, the traffic flow is dynamic due to the continuous changing of the traffic environment. Thus, it is very important to model the spatial relation and temporal dependence simultaneously to simulate the true traffic conditions. Most of the existing destination prediction methods have limited ability to model large-scale spatial data that changes dynamically with time, so they cannot obtain satisfactory prediction results. This paper proposes a human-in-loop Spatial-Temporal Attention Mechanism with Graph Convolutional Network (STAGCN) model to explore the spatial-temporal dependencies for destination prediction. The main contributions of this study are as follows. First, the traffic network is represented as a graph network by grid region dividing, then the spatial-temporal correlations of the traffic network can be learned by convolution operations in time on the graph network. Second, the attention mechanism is exploited for the analysis of features with loop periodicity and enhancing the features of key nodes in the grid. Finally, the spatial and temporal features are combined as the input of the Long-Short Term Memory network (LSTM) to further capture the spatial-temporal dependences of the traffic data to reach more accurate results. Extensive experiments conducted on the large scale urban real dataset show that the proposed STAGCN model has achieved better performance in urban car-hailing destination prediction compared with the traditional baseline models.