Beatriz Lopez Boada

While the increased availability of traffic data is allowing us to better understand urban mobility, research on data-driven and predictive modeling is also providing new methods for improving traffic management and reducing congestion. In this paper, we present a hybrid predictive modeling architecture, namely GAT-LSTM, by incorporating graph attention (GAT) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for handling traffic prediction tasks. In this architecture, GAT networks capture the spatial dependencies of the traffic network, LSTM networks capture the temporal correlations, and the Dayfeature component incorporates time and external information (such as day of the week, extreme weather conditions, holidays, etc.). A key attention block is designed to integrate GAT, LSTM, and the Dayfeature components as well as learn and assign weights to these different components within the architecture. This method of integration is proven effective at improving prediction accuracy, as shown by the experimental results obtained with the PeMS08 open dataset, and the proposed model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in these experiments. Furthermore, the hybrid model demonstrates adaptability to dynamic traffic conditions, different prediction horizons, and various traffic networks.