Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search for Traffic Forecasting

Abstract

Traffic forecasting is a challenging task due to complex spatial and temporal dependencies across sensor locations and time. Interest in solving this task has increased, but current research focuses on manually constructing neural network architectures without the aid of neural architecture search (NAS). In our work, we explore evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS) by deploying a genetic algorithm (GA) to find optimal neural network architectures for predicting traffic conditions. The search space for the GA consists of arbitrary combinations of dilated convolutions and graph convolutions for modelling temporal and spatial dependencies respectively, limited in complexity only by technical constraints. Experimental results show that model architectures obtained via GA are able to match the current state-of-the-art on traffic prediction benchmarks.