# Simpler is better: Multilevel Abstraction with Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network Cells for Traffic Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.03858 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03858/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Sequence Labeling via Bi-directional LSTM-CNNs-CRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01354/) (2016)
- [Traffic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network: A Deep Learning Framework for Network-Scale Traffic Learning and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07007/) (2018)
- [Learning Traffic as Images: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Large-Scale Transportation Network Speed Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04245/) (2017)
- [Deep Bidirectional and Unidirectional LSTM Recurrent Neural Network for Network-wide Traffic Speed Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02143/) (2018)
- [Spatiotemporal Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Traffic Prediction in Transportation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02699/) (2017)
- [A Neural Network Architecture Combining Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for Intrusion Detection in Network Traffic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03082/) (2017)
- [Graph Convolution: A High-Order and Adaptive Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09916/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [HydroVision: LiDAR-Guided Hydrometric Prediction with Vision Transformers and Hybrid Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15213/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) combined with variants of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have reached state-of-the-art performance in spatiotemporal forecasting tasks. This is particularly the case for traffic forecasting, where GNN models use the graph structure of road networks to account for spatial correlation between links and nodes. Recent solutions are either based on complex graph operations or avoiding predefined graphs. This paper proposes a new sequence-to-sequence architecture to extract the spatiotemporal correlation at multiple levels of abstraction using GNN-RNN cells with sparse architecture to decrease training time compared to more complex designs. Encoding the same input sequence through multiple encoders, with an incremental increase in encoder layers, enables the network to learn general and detailed information through multilevel abstraction. We further present a new benchmark dataset of street-level segment traffic data from Montreal, Canada. Unlike highways, urban road segments are cyclic and characterized by complicated spatial dependencies. Experimental results on the METR-LA benchmark highway and our MSLTD street-level segment datasets demonstrate that our model improves performance by more than 7% for one-hour prediction compared to the baseline methods while reducing computing resource requirements by more than half compared to other competing methods.