Urban traffic flow prediction: a dynamic temporal graph network considering missing values

Abstract Accurate traffic flow prediction on the urban road network is an indispensable function of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), which is of great significance for urban traffic planning. However, the current traffic flow prediction methods still face many challenges, such as missing values and dynamic spatial relationships in traffic flow. In this study, a dynamic temporal graph neural network considering missing values (D-TGNM) is proposed for traffic flow prediction. First, inspired by the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), we extend the classic BERT model, called Traffic BERT, to learn the dynamic spatial associations on the road structure. Second, we propose a temporal graph neural network considering missing values (TGNM) to mine traffic flow patterns in missing data scenarios for traffic flow prediction. Finally, the proposed D-TGNM model can be obtained by integrating the dynamic spatial associations learned by Traffic BERT into the TGNM model. To train the D-TGNM model, we design a novel loss function, which considers the missing values problem and prediction problem in traffic flow, to optimize the proposed model. The proposed model was validated on an actual traffic dataset collected in Wuhan, China. Experimental results showed that D-TGNM achieved good prediction results under four missing data scenarios (15% random missing, 15% block missing, 30% random missing, and 30% block missing), and outperformed ten existing state-of-the-art baselines.