Spatiotemporal forecasting has various applications in neuroscience, climate and transportation domain. Traffic forecasting is one canonical example of such learning task. The task is challenging due to (1) complex spatial dependency on road networks, (2) non-linear temporal dynamics with changing road conditions and (3) inherent difficulty of long-term forecasting. To address these challenges, we propose to model the traffic flow as a diffusion process on a directed graph and introduce Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (DCRNN), a deep learning framework for traffic forecasting that incorporates both spatial and temporal dependency in the traffic flow. Specifically, DCRNN captures the spatial dependency using bidirectional random walks on the graph, and the temporal dependency using the encoder-decoder architecture with scheduled sampling. We evaluate the framework on two real-world large-scale road network traffic datasets and observe consistent improvement of 12% - 15% over state-of-the-art baselines Spatiotemporal forecasting is a crucial task for a learning system that operates in a dynamic environment. It has a wide range of applications from autonomous vehicles operations, to energy and smart grid optimization, to logistics and supply chain management. In this paper, we study one important task: traffic forecasting on road networks, the core component of the intelligent transportation systems. The goal of traffic forecasting is to predict the future traffic speeds of a sensor network given historic traffic speeds and the underlying road networks. This task is challenging mainly due to the complex spatiotemporal dependencies and inherent difficulty in the long term forecasting. On the one hand, traffic time series demonstrate strong temporal dynamics. Recurring incidents such as rush hours or accidents can cause nonstationarity, making it difficult to forecast longterm. On the other hand, sensors on the road network contain complex yet unique spatial correlations. FIG0 illustrates an example. Road 1 and road 2 are correlated, while road 1 and road 3 are not. Although road 1 and road 3 are close in the Euclidean space, they demonstrate very different behaviors. Moreover, the future traffic speed is influenced more by the downstream traffic than the upstream one. This means that the spatial structure in traffic is nonEuclidean and directional.Traffic forecasting has been studied for decades, falling into two main categories: knowledgedriven approach and data-driven approach. In transportation and operational research, knowledgedriven methods usually apply queuing theory and simulate user behaviors in traffic BID6 . In time series community, data-driven methods such as Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model and Kalman filtering remain popular BID22 BID21 . However, simple time series models usually rely on the stationarity assumption, which is often violated by the traffic data. Most recently, deep learning models for traffic forecasting have been developed in BID23 ; BID35 , but without considering the spatial structure. BID31 and BID24 model the spatial correlation with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), but the spatial structure is in the Euclidean space (e.g., 2D images). BID4 , studied graph convolution, but only for undirected graphs.In this work, we represent the pair-wise spatial correlations between traffic sensors using a directed graph whose nodes are sensors and edge weights denote proximity between the sensor pairs measured by the road network distance. We model the dynamics of the traffic flow as a diffusion process and propose the diffusion convolution operation to capture the spatial dependency. We further propose Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (DCRNN) that integrates diffusion convolution, the sequence to sequence architecture and the scheduled sampling technique. When evaluated on realworld traffic datasets, DCRNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art traffic forecasting baselines by a large margin. In summary:• We study the traffic forecasting problem and model the spatial dependency of traffic as a diffusion process on a directed graph. We propose diffusion convolution, which has an intuitive interpretation and can be computed efficiently.• We propose Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (DCRNN), a holistic approach that captures both spatial and temporal dependencies among time series using diffusion convolution and the sequence to sequence learning framework together with scheduled sampling. DCRNN is not limited to transportation and is readily applicable to other spatiotemporal forecasting tasks.• We conducted extensive experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets, and the proposed approach obtains significant improvement over state-of-the-art baseline methods. In this paper, we formulated the traffic prediction on road network as a spatiotemporal forecasting problem, and proposed the diffusion convolutional recurrent neural network that captures the spatiotemporal dependencies. Specifically, we use bidirectional graph random walk to model spatial dependency and recurrent neural network to capture the temporal dynamics. We further integrated the encoder-decoder architecture and the scheduled sampling technique to improve the performance for long-term forecasting. When evaluated on two large-scale real-world traffic datasets, our approach obtained significantly better prediction than baselines. For future work, we will investigate the following two aspects (1) applying the proposed model to other spatial-temporal forecasting tasks; (2) modeling the spatiotemporal dependency when the underlying graph structure is evolving, e.g., the K nearest neighbor graph for moving objects.
A neural sequence model that learns to forecast on a directed graph. The paper proposes the Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network architecture for the spatiotemporal traffic forecasting problem Proposes to build a traffic forecasting model using a diffusion process for convolutional recurrent neural networks to address saptio-temporal autocorrelation.