Beyond homophily in spatial–temporal traffic flow forecasting

Abstract

Traffic flow forecasting is a crucial yet complex task due to the intricate spatial–temporal correlations arising from road interactions. Recent methods model these interactions using message-passing Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs), which work for homophily graphs where connected nodes primarily exhibit close observations. However, relying solely on homophily graphs presents inherent limitations in traffic modeling, as road interactions can yield not only close but also distant observations over time, revealing diverse and dynamic node-wise correlations. We designate this phenomenon as homophily–heterophily dynamics, which has been largely overlooked in previous works. To address this gap, we propose a homophily–heterophily Spatial–Temporal Graph Convolution Network (H²STGCN) that exploits both homophily and heterophily components in the spatial–temporal domain. Specifically, we first adopt time-related node attributes to disentangle the diverse and dynamic node-wise relations across time, thereby obtaining homophily and heterophily Spatial–Temporal Graphs (STGs), which provide comprehensive insights into road interactions. Subsequently, we construct dual information propagation branches, each outfitted with a specific type of STG, to exploit multiple ranges of spatial–temporal correlations from distinct perspectives through dilated causal spatial–temporal graph convolution operations on STGs. Additionally, we introduce a Graph Collaborative Learning Module (GCLM) to capture the complementary information of these two branches via mutual information transfer. Experimental evaluation on four real-world traffic datasets reveals that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.