Spatio-Temporal Meta Learning for Urban Traffic Prediction

Predicting urban traffic is of great importance to intelligent transportation systems and public safety, yet is very challenging in three aspects: 1) complex spatio-temporal correlations of urban traffic, including spatial correlations between locations along with temporal correlations among timestamps; 2) spatial diversity of such spatio-temporal correlations, which varies from location to location and depends on the surrounding geographical information, e.g., points of interests and road networks; and 3) temporal diversity of such spatio-temporal correlations, which is highly influenced by dynamic traffic states. To tackle these challenges, we proposed a deep meta learning based model, entitled ST-MetaNet+, to collectively predict traffic in all locations at the same time. ST-MetaNet+ employs a sequence-to-sequence architecture, consisting of an encoder to learn historical information and a decoder to make predictions step by step. Specifically, the encoder and decoder have the same network structure, consisting of meta graph attention networks and meta recurrent neural networks, to capture diverse spatial correlations and diverse temporal correlations, respectively. Furthermore, the weights (parameters) of meta graph attention networks and meta recurrent networks are generated from the embeddings of geo-graph attributes and the traffic context learned from dynamic traffic states. Extensive experiments were conducted based on three real-world datasets to illustrate the effectiveness of ST-MetaNet+ beyond several state-of-the-art methods.