# ESGCN: Edge Squeeze Attention Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01227/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09641/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Spatial-Temporal Similarity: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01254/) (2018)
- [Cosine Normalization: Using Cosine Similarity Instead of Dot Product in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05870/) (2017)
- [Edge-Featured Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07671/) (2021)
- [A Generalization of Convolutional Neural Networks to Graph-Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08165/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic forecasting is a highly challenging task owing to the dynamical spatio-temporal dependencies of traffic flows. To handle this, we focus on modeling the spatio-temporal dynamics and propose a network termed Edge Squeeze Graph Convolutional Network (ESGCN) to forecast traffic flow in multiple regions. ESGCN consists of two modules: W-module and ES module. W-module is a fully node-wise convolutional network. It encodes the time-series of each traffic region separately and decomposes the time-series at various scales to capture fine and coarse features. The ES module models the spatio-temporal dynamics using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and generates an Adaptive Adjacency Matrix (AAM) with temporal features. To improve the accuracy of AAM, we introduce three key concepts. 1) Using edge features to directly capture the spatiotemporal flow representation among regions. 2) Applying an edge attention mechanism to GCN to extract the AAM from the edge features. Here, the attention mechanism can effectively determine important spatio-temporal adjacency relations. 3) Proposing a novel node contrastive loss to suppress obstructed connections and emphasize related connections. Experimental results show that ESGCN achieves state-of-the-art performance by a large margin on four real-world datasets (PEMS03, 04, 07, and 08) with a low computational cost.