Dual-Attention Multi-Scale Graph Convolutional Networks for Highway Accident Delay Time Prediction

Traffic-related forecasting plays a critical role in determining transportation policy, unlike traditional approaches, which can only make decisions based on statistical results or historical experience. Through machine learning, we are able to capture the potential interactions between urban dynamics and find their mutual interactions in a spatial context. However, despite a plethora of traffic-related studies, few works have explored predicting the impact of congestion. Therefore, this paper focuses on predicting how a car accident leads to traffic congestion, especially the length of time it takes for the congestion to occur. Accordingly, we propose a novel model named Dual-Attention Multi-Scale Graph Convolutional Networks (DAMGNet) to address this issue. In this proposed model, heterogeneous data such as accident information, urban dynamics, and various highway network characteristics are considered and combined. Next, the context encoder encodes the accident data, and the spatial encoder captures the hidden features between multi-scale Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). With our designed dual attention mechanism, the DAMGNet model is able to effectively learn the correlation between features. The evaluations conducted on a real-world dataset prove that our DAMGNet has a significant improvement in RMSE and MAE over other comparative methods.