Integrating knowledge representation into traffic prediction: a spatial–temporal graph neural network with adaptive fusion features

Various external factors that interfere with traffic flow, such as weather conditions, traffic accidents, incidents, and Points of Interest (POIs), need to be considered in performing traffic forecasting tasks. However, the current research methods encounter difficulties in effectively incorporating these factors with traffic characteristics and efficiently updating them, which leads to a lack of dynamics and interpretability. Moreover, capturing temporal dependence and spatial dependence separately and sequentially can result in issues, such as information loss and model errors. To address these challenges, we present a Knowledge Representation learning-actuated spatial–temporal graph neural network (KR-STGNN) for traffic flow prediction. We combine the knowledge embedding with the traffic features via Gated Feature Fusion Module (GFFM), and dynamically update the traffic features adaptively according to the importance of external factors. To conduct the co-capture of spatial–temporal dependencies, we subsequently propose a spatial–temporal feature synchronous capture module (ST-FSCM) combining dilation causal convolution with GRU. Experimental results on a real-world traffic data set demonstrate that KR-STGNN has superior forecasting performances over diverse prediction horizons, especially for short-term prediction. The ablation and perturbation analysis experiments further validate the effectiveness and robustness of the designed method.