JSTC: Travel Time Prediction with a Joint Spatial-Temporal Correlation Mechanism

Accurate travel time prediction is one of the most promising intelligent transportation system (ITS) services, which can greatly support route planning, ride-sharing, navigation applications, and effective traffic management. Several factors, like spatial, temporal, and external, have big effects on traffic patterns, and therefore, it is important to develop a mechanism that can jointly capture correlations of these components. However, spatial sparsity issues make travel time prediction very challenging, especially when dealing with the origin-destination (OD) method, since the trajectory data may not be available. In this paper, we introduce a unified deep learning-based framework named joint spatial-temporal correlation (JSTC) mechanism to improve the accuracy of OD travel time prediction. First, we design a spatiotemporal correlation block that combines two modules: self-convolutional attention integrated with a temporal convolutional network (TCN) to capture the spatial correlations along with the temporal dependencies. Then, we enhance our model performance through adopting a multi-head attention module to learn the attentional weights of the spatial, temporal, and external features based on their contributions to the output and speed up the training process. Extensive experiments on three large-scale real-world traffic datasets (NYC, Chengdu, and Xi’an) show the efficiency of our model and its superiority compared to other methods.