Transfer learning with graph neural networks for short-term highway traffic forecasting

Large-scale highway traffic forecasting approaches are critical for intelligent transportation systems. Recently, deep-learning-based traffic forecasting methods have emerged as promising approaches for a wide range of traffic forecasting tasks. These methods are specific to a given traffic network, however, and consequently they cannot be used for forecasting traffic on an unseen traffic network. Previous work has identified diffusion convolutional recurrent neural networks, (DCRNN), as a state-of-the-art method for highway traffic forecasting. It models the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of a highway network using a graph-based diffusion convolution operation within a recurrent neural network. Currently, DCRNN cannot perform transfer learning because it learns location-specific traffic patterns, which cannot be used for unseen regions of a network or new geographic locations. To that end, we develop TL-DCRNN, a new transfer learning approach for DCRNN, where a single model trained on a highway network can be used to forecast traffic on unseen highway networks. Given a traffic network with a large amount of traffic data, our approach consists of partitioning the traffic network into a number of subgraphs and using a new training scheme that utilizes subgraphs to marginalize the location-specific information, thus learning the traffic as a function of network connectivity and temporal patterns alone. The resulting trained model can be used to forecast traffic on unseen networks. We demonstrate that TL-DCRNN can learn from San Francisco regional traffic data and can forecast traffic on the Los Angeles region and vice versa.