Highway Traffic Forecasting with the Diffusion Model : An Image-Generation Based Approach

Abstract: Forecasting of highway traffic is a common practice for real traffic information system, and is of vital importance to traffic management and control on highways. As a typical time-series forecasting task, we want to propose a deep learning model to map the historical sensory traffic values (e.g., speed, flow) to future traffic forecasts. Prevailing traffic forecasting methods focus on the graph representation of the urban road. However, compared to the dense connectivity of urban road networks, highway traffic flows normally run on road segments of serial topology. This indicates that the highway traffic flows do not have the same type of spatial interaction, therefore motivating us to resort to a new forecasting paradigm. While traffic patterns can be intuitively represented by spatial-temporal (ST) images, this study transforms the traffic forecasting task into the conditional image generation task. Our approach explores the inherent properties of ST-images from the perspectives of physical meaning and traffic dynamics. An innovative deep learning based architecture is designed to process the ST-image, and a diffusion model is trained to obtain traffic forecasts by generating future ST-image based on the historical STimages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture in processing ST-image through ablation studies and the effectiveness of the model through comparison with popular baseline models, i.e., LSTM and T-GCN.