Utilizing Attention-Based Multi-Encoder-Decoder Neural Networks for Freeway Traffic Speed Prediction

Speed prediction is a crucial yet complicated task for intelligent transportation systems. The challenge derives from the complex spatiotemporal dependencies of traffic parameters. In the past few years, deep neural networks have achieved the best traffic speed prediction performance. However, most models depend on short-term input sequences to predict short/long-term traffic speed (e.g., predicting speed for the next hour using data from the past hour). These models fail to consider the daily and weekly periodic behavior of traffic. Another problem posed by neural networks is the lack of interpretability as they often operate as "black boxes". In this paper, an attention-based multi-encoder-decoder (Att-MED) model is proposed to predict traffic speed. The model uses convolutional-LSTMs to capture the spatiotemporal relationship of multiple input sequences, namely short-term, daily and weekly traffic patterns. The model also employs an LSTM to model the output predictions sequentially. Furthermore, attention mechanism is used to weigh the contribution of each traffic sequence towards the output predictions. The proposed network architecture, when trained end-to-end, results in a superior prediction accuracy compared to baseline models. In addition to contributing towards performance, the attention mechanism creates weight values, which when visualized, provide insights into the decision-making process of the neural network, and consequently produce explainable outputs. Att-MED's extracted attention weights highlight the contribution of daily and weekly periodic input towards speed prediction.