A Novel Approach to Calculate the Spatial–Temporal Correlation for Traffic Flow Based on the Structure of Urban Road Networks and Traffic Dynamic Theory

Determining the spatial–temporal correlation (STC) between roads can help clarify the operation characteristics of road traffic. Moreover, this correlation affects the utilization quality of traffic data in related research fields. Therefore, it is of significance to provide more reasonable correlation information for other research, such as in traffic speed prediction. Most of the traditional correlation calculation methods for traffic are based on only statistical theory. These methods are simple, but their ability to explain the actual phenomenon is limited due to the lack of consideration of the actual traffic operation characteristics. Therefore, to provide more reasonable correlation information between roads, this paper analysed the influence mechanism of urban traffic based on the traffic dynamic model, and two parameters, traffic complete influence time and traffic correlation strength, were proposed to bring physical meaning to the calculation of STC. Then, an improved calculation model of the STC between different roads considering the adjacency between roads was proposed in this paper. Finally, this paper verified this method against two common traditional methods through different experiments. The verification results show that the calculation method proposed in this paper has better interpretability for the STC between different roads and can better reveal the internal traffic operation characteristics of the road network.