Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network with Transformer and Whale Optimization Algorithm for Traffic Flow Prediction

Accurate traffic flow prediction plays a crucial role in the development of intelligent traffic management. Despite numerous investigations into spatio-temporal methods, achieving high accuracy in traffic flow prediction remains challenging. This challenge arises from the complex dynamic spatio-temporal correlations within the traffic road network and the limitations imposed by the selection of hyperparameters based on experiments and manual experience, which can affect the performance of the network architecture. This paper introduces a novel transformer-based adaptive graph convolutional recurrent network. The proposed network automatically infers the interdependencies among different traffic sequences and incorporates the capability to capture global spatio-temporal correlations. This enables the dynamic capture of long-range temporal correlations. Furthermore, the whale optimization algorithm is employed to efficiently design an optimal network structure that aligns with the requirements of the traffic domain and maximizes the utilization of limited computational resources. This design approach significantly enhances the model’s performance and improves the accuracy of traffic flow prediction. The experimental results on four real datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. In PEMS03, it improves MAE by 2.6% and RMSE by 1.4%. In PEMS04, improvements are 1.6% in MAE and 1.4% in RMSE, with a similar MAPE score to the best baseline. For PEMS07, our approach shows a 4.1% improvement in MAE and 2.2% in RMSE. On PEMS08, it surpasses the current best baseline with a 3.4% improvement in MAE and 1.6% in RMSE. These results confirm the good performance of our model in traffic flow prediction across multiple datasets.