TIGC-Net: Transformer-Improved Graph Convolution Network for spatio-temporal prediction

Modeling spatio-temporal sequences is an important topic yet challenging for existing neural networks. Most of the current spatio-temporal sequence prediction methods usually capture features separately in temporal and spatial dimensions or employ multiple mutually independent local spatio-temporal graphs to represent a spatio-temporal sequence. The first kind of method mentioned above is difficult to mine the complex spatiotemporal correlations, while the other is limited for the accuracy of long-term predictions. To handle these issues, this paper proposes a Transformer-Improved Graph Convolution Network for spatio-temporal prediction. Specifically, the temporal location encoding method is exploited to derive the spatio-temporal characteristics of the sequence utilizing a spatio-temporal feature fusion network. In addition, a spatio-temporal attention network is developed to enhance the spatio-temporal correlation of the sequence, and the dynamic spatial features of sequence are further extracted through the adaptive graph convolution network. A private dataset and a public dataset are employed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed TIGC-Net. The qualitative and quantitative results show that the proposed TIGC-Net can extract dynamic spatio-temporal properties more effectively, enhance the spatio-temporal correlation of sequences and improve the prediction accuracy compared with four state-of-the-art.