# Revisiting Random Forests in a Comparative Evaluation of Graph Convolutional Neural Network Variants for Traffic Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19292 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19292/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09641/) (2020)
- [Efficient Metropolitan Traffic Prediction Based on Graph Recurrent Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00740/) (2018)

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

- [Dynamical Lie Algebras Cannot Describe Shallow QAOA: Cragged Terrains, Barren Plateaus, and Empirical Hardness Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04252/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic prediction is a spatiotemporal predictive task that plays an essential role in intelligent transportation systems. Today, graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) have become the prevailing models in the traffic prediction literature since they excel at extracting spatial correlations. In this work, we classify the components of successful GCNN prediction models and analyze the effects of matrix factorization, attention mechanism, and weight sharing on their performance. Furthermore, we compare these variations against random forests, a traditional regression method that predates GCNNs by over 15 years. We evaluated these methods using simulated data of two regions in Toronto as well as real-world sensor data from selected California highways. We found that incorporating matrix factorization, attention, and location-specific model weights either individually or collectively into GCNNs can result in a better overall performance. Moreover, although random forest regression is a less compact model, it matches or exceeds the performance of all variations of GCNNs in our experiments. This suggests that the current graph convolutional methods may not be the best approach to traffic prediction and there is still room for improvement. Finally, our findings also suggest that for future research on GCNN for traffic prediction to be credible, researchers must include performance comparison to random forests.