AdpSTGCN: Adaptive spatial-temporal graph convolutional network for traffic forecasting

Traffic flow forecasting plays a crucial role in applications such as intelligent transportation systems. Despite significant research in this field, the current methods have limitations that hinder the realization of highly accurate predictions. Existing GCN-based approaches typically rely on a definite graph structure derived from a physical topology or learned from node features, which is insufficient for building intricate spatial relationships among nodes. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptive spatial-temporal graph convolutional network for traffic forecasting. Our approach exploits a multi-head attention mechanism to construct multi-view feature graphs. We then introduce an adaptive graph convolution method to dynamically aggregate and propagate information from both the topology graph and multi-view feature graphs, which are capable of capturing complex spatial correlations across diverse proximity ranges. Furthermore, we designed a cascaded structural framework that combines temporal information with node features using gated dilated causal convolution to ensure the integrated modeling of spatial-temporal dynamics in traffic flow. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current mainstream methods, achieving better performance in traffic flow forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/dhxdla/AdpSTGCN.git.