Crowd Flow Prediction: An Integrated Approach Using Dynamic Spatial–Temporal Adaptive Modeling for Pattern Flow Relationships

Abstract

Predicting crowd flows in smart cities poses a significant challenge for the intelligent transportation system (ITS). Traffic management and behavioral analysis are crucial and have garnered considerable attention from researchers. However, accurately and timely predicting crowd flow is difficult due to various complex factors, including dependencies on recent crowd flow and neighboring regions. Existing studies often focus on spatial–temporal dependencies but neglect to model the relationship between crowd flow in distant areas. In our study, we observe that the daily flow of each region remains relatively consistent, and certain regions, despite being far apart, exhibit similar flow patterns, indicating a strong correlation between them. In this paper, we proposed a novel Multiscale Adaptive Graph-Gated Network (MSAGGN) model. The main components of MSAGGN can be divided into three major parts: (1) To capture the parallel periodic learning architecture through a layer-wise gated mechanism, a layer-wise functional approach is employed to modify gated mechanism, establishing parallel skip periodic connections to effectively manage temporal and external factor information at each time interval; (2) a graph convolutional-based adaptive mechanism that effectively captures crowd flow traffic data by considering dynamic spatial–temporal correlations; and (3) we proposed a novel intelligent channel encoder (ICE). The task of this block is to capture citywide spatial–temporal correlation along external factors to preserve correlation for distant regions with external elements. To integrate spatio-temporal flexibility, we introduce the adaptive transformation module. We assessed our model's performance by comparing it with previous state-of-the-art models and conducting experiments using two real-world datasets for evaluation.