Cheonbok Park

Daejin Kim, Youngin Cho, Dongmin Kim et al.

Predicting traffic conditions is tremendously challenging since every road is highly dependent on each other, both spatially and temporally. Recently, to capture this spatial and temporal dependency, specially designed architectures such as graph convolutional networks and temporal convolutional networks have been introduced. While there has been remarkable progress in traffic forecasting, we found that deep-learning-based traffic forecasting models still fail in certain patterns, mainly in event situations (e.g., rapid speed drops). Although it is commonly accepted that these failures are due to unpredictable noise, we found that these failures can be corrected by considering previous failures. Specifically, we observe autocorrelated errors in these failures, which indicates that some predictable information remains. In this study, to capture the correlation of errors, we introduce ResCAL, a residual estimation module for traffic forecasting, as a widely applicable add-on module to existing traffic forecasting models. Our ResCAL calibrates the prediction of the existing models in real time by estimating future errors using previous errors and graph signals. Extensive experiments on METR-LA and PEMS-BAY demonstrate that our ResCAL can correctly capture the correlation of errors and correct the failures of various traffic forecasting models in event situations.

Hyunwook Lee, Cheonbok Park, Seungmin Jin et al.

To tackle ever-increasing city traffic congestion problems, researchers have proposed deep learning models to aid decision-makers in the traffic control domain. Although the proposed models have been remarkably improved in recent years, there are still questions that need to be answered before deploying models. For example, it is difficult to figure out which models provide state-of-the-art performance, as recently proposed models have often been evaluated with different datasets and experiment environments. It is also difficult to determine which models would work when traffic conditions change abruptly (e.g., rush hour). In this work, we conduct two experiments to answer the two questions. In the first experiment, we conduct an experiment with the state-of-the-art models and the identical public datasets to compare model performance under a consistent experiment environment. We then extract a set of temporal regions in the datasets, whose speeds change abruptly and use these regions to explore model performance with difficult intervals. The experiment results indicate that Graph-WaveNet and GMAN show better performance in general. We also find that prediction models tend to have varying performances with data and intervals, which calls for in-depth analysis of models on difficult intervals for real-world deployment.