MDTP: a multi-source deep traffic prediction framework over spatio-temporal trajectory data

Traffic prediction has drawn increasing attention for its ubiquitous real-life applications in traffic management, urban computing, public safety, and so on. Recently, the availability of massive trajectory data and the success of deep learning motivate a plethora of deep traffic prediction studies. However, the existing neural-network-based approaches tend to ignore the correlations between multiple types of moving objects located in the same spatio-temporal traffic area, which is suboptimal for traffic prediction analytics. In this paper, we propose a multi-source deep traffic prediction framework over spatio-temporal trajectory data, termed as MDTP. The framework includes two phases: spatio-temporal feature modeling and multi-source bridging. We present an enhanced graph convolutional network (GCN) model combined with long short-term memory network (LSTM) to capture the spatial dependencies and temporal dynamics of traffic in the feature modeling phase. In the multi-source bridging phase, we propose two methods, Sum and Concat, to connect the learned features from different trajectory data sources. Extensive experiments on two real-life datasets show that MDTP i) has superior efficiency, compared with classical time-series methods, machine learning methods, and state-of-the-art neural-network-based approaches; ii) offers a significant performance improvement over the single-source traffic prediction approach; and iii) performs traffic predictions in seconds even on tens of millions of trajectory data. we develop MDTP + , a user-friendly interactive system to demonstrate traffic prediction analysis.