HMIAN: A Hierarchical Mapping and Interactive Attention Data Fusion Network for Traffic Forecasting

With the development of intelligent transportation system (ITS), the vital technology of ITS, short-term traffic forecasting, gains increasing attention. However, the existing prediction models ignore the impact of urban functional zones (FZs) on traffic data, resulting in inaccurate extractions of dynamic spatial relationships from network. Furthermore, how to calculate the influence of external factors, such as weather and holidays on traffic is an unsolved problem. This article proposes a spatio-temporal hierarchical mapping and interactive attention network (HMIAN), which extracts the spatial features from traffic network by constructing FZs, and designs an effective external factors fusion method. HMIAN uses the hierarchical mapping structure to aggregate the roads into FZs, calculate the interaction between FZs and feed this information back to the spatial features. And the interactive attention mechanism is utilized to fuse the traffic data with external factors effectively, and extracts temporal features. In addition, some experiments were carried out on three real traffic data sets. First, experiment results show the better prediction performance of the proposed model compared with other existing methods in a complex traffic network. Second, the longitudinal comparison experiment verifies that the hierarchical mapping structure is effective in extracting spatial features in a complex road network. Finally, the influence of different external factors and fusion methods on traffic prediction are compared, which provides a consult for subsequent research on the influence of external factors.

Automated summary

With the proposal of the HMIAN model, it aims to better predict short-term traffic flow by considering the spatial and temporal features and effectively fusing traffic data with external factors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the hierarchical mapping structure and the influence of different external factors on traffic prediction, providing valuable insights for future research in this area.