# GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08415 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/

## Key facts

- Cited by 434 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 434)

- [Graph Neural Network-Based Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06947/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11174/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Prediction: Benchmark and Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14917/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Temporal Identity: A Simple yet Effective Baseline for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05233/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks for Time Series: Forecasting, Classification, Imputation, and Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03759/) (2023)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Predictive Learning in Urban Computing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14483/) (2023)
- [PDFormer: Propagation Delay-Aware Dynamic Long-Range Transformer for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07945/) (2023)
- [ETA Prediction with Graph Neural Networks in Google Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11482/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09112/) (2022)
- [PyTorch Geometric Temporal: Spatiotemporal Signal Processing with Neural Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07788/) (2021)
- [Pre-training Enhanced Spatial-temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09113/) (2022)
- [Exploring Progress in Multivariate Time Series Forecasting: Comprehensive Benchmarking and Heterogeneity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06119/) (2023)
- [Large Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Data: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10196/) (2023)
- [Spatio-Temporal Meta-Graph Learning for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14701/) (2022)
- [Spatial-Temporal Large Language Model for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10134/) (2024)
- [UrbanGPT: Spatio-Temporal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00813/) (2024)
- [Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervised Learning for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04475/) (2022)
- [DL-Traff: Survey and Benchmark of Deep Learning Models for Urban Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09091/) (2021)
- [AirFormer: Predicting Nationwide Air Quality in China with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15979/) (2022)
- [Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Dynamic Graph Neural ODEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08408/) (2022)
- [Learning to Reconstruct Missing Data from Spatiotemporal Graphs with Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13479/) (2022)
- [Towards Spatio-Temporal Aware Traffic Time Series Forecasting--Full Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15737/) (2022)
- [Traffic Flow Forecasting with Spatial-Temporal Graph Diffusion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04038/) (2021)
- [Scalable Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06520/) (2022)
- [MSGNet: Learning Multi-Scale Inter-Series Correlations for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00423/) (2023)
- [AutoCTS: Automated Correlated Time Series Forecasting -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11174/) (2021)
- [Deciphering Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting: A Causal Lens and Treatment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13378/) (2023)
- [Long-Range Transformers for Dynamic Spatiotemporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12218/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Adaptive Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04828/) (2022)
- [Spatial-Temporal Hypergraph Self-Supervised Learning for Crime Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08587/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-term traffic prediction is highly challenging due to the complexity of traffic systems and the constantly changing nature of many impacting factors. In this paper, we focus on the spatio-temporal factors, and propose a graph multi-attention network (GMAN) to predict traffic conditions for time steps ahead at different locations on a road network graph. GMAN adapts an encoder-decoder architecture, where both the encoder and the decoder consist of multiple spatio-temporal attention blocks to model the impact of the spatio-temporal factors on traffic conditions. The encoder encodes the input traffic features and the decoder predicts the output sequence. Between the encoder and the decoder, a transform attention layer is applied to convert the encoded traffic features to generate the sequence representations of future time steps as the input of the decoder. The transform attention mechanism models the direct relationships between historical and future time steps that helps to alleviate the error propagation problem among prediction time steps. Experimental results on two real-world traffic prediction tasks (i.e., traffic volume prediction and traffic speed prediction) demonstrate the superiority of GMAN. In particular, in the 1 hour ahead prediction, GMAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 4% improvement in MAE measure. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhengchuanpan/GMAN.
