Spatiotemporal Generalization Graph Neural Network-Based Prediction Models by Considering Morphological Diversity in Traffic Networks

Abstract

The morphological diversity, referring to the variations in traffic network topologies defined in this paper, often emerges and brings difficulties in successfully transferring a pre-trained prediction model from one traffic network to another. Moreover, most existing research primarily assumes that traffic data in source and target networks follow independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) patterns, which is usually not consistent with real-world situations, particularly when considering morphological diversity. For this inconsistency, many efforts have been made, but they mainly concentrate on temporal aspects, which significantly differ from traffic prediction due to spatial and temporal correlations among road segments, influenced by variations in road topology and traffic behavior. This paper introduces a causality-based spatiotemporal out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization method, which is adaptable to most GNNs for diverse, large-scale, dynamic traffic systems with zero-shot. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization and adaptability of the proposed method, we introduce graph matching and equal-sized graph partitioning to alleviate spatial shift between the source and target traffic networks, reduce and align the scale of the networks. Experiments carried out on traffic flow datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of various GNN-based traffic predictors in the situation of morphological diversity, achieving a maximum reduction in MAE of 33.08%. Compared to other OOD-driven baselines, our approach also shows a notable improvement, with up to a 40.58% decrease in MAE.