HetGL2R: Learning to Rank Critical Road Segments via Attributed Heterogeneous Graph Random Walks
This addresses traffic management and urban planning needs by improving ranking accuracy for road segments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing graph methods with additional data integration.
The paper tackles the problem of ranking critical road segments in traffic networks by proposing HetGL2R, which integrates origin-destination demand and route information into a graph learning approach, achieving more accurate and robust node ranking compared to baselines on synthetic datasets.
Accurately identifying critical nodes with high spatial influence in road networks is essential for enhancing the efficiency of traffic management and urban planning. However, existing node importance ranking methods mainly rely on structural features and topological information, often overlooking critical factors such as origin-destination (OD) demand and route information. This limitation leaves considerable room for improvement in ranking accuracy. To address this issue, we propose HetGL2R, an attributed heterogeneous graph learning approach for ranking node importance in road networks. This method introduces a tripartite graph (trip graph) to model the structure of the road network, integrating OD demand, route choice, and various structural features of road segments. Based on the trip graph, we design an embedding method to learn node representations that reflect the spatial influence of road segments. The method consists of a heterogeneous random walk sampling algorithm (HetGWalk) and a Transformer encoder. HetGWalk constructs multiple attribute-guided graphs based on the trip graph to enrich the diversity of semantic associations between nodes. It then applies a joint random walk mechanism to convert both topological structures and node attributes into sequences, enabling the encoder to capture spatial dependencies more effectively among road segments. Finally, a listwise ranking strategy is employed to evaluate node importance. To validate the performance of our method, we construct two synthetic datasets using SUMO based on simulated road networks. Experimental results demonstrate that HetGL2R significantly outperforms baselines in incorporating OD demand and route choice information, achieving more accurate and robust node ranking. Furthermore, we conduct a case study using real-world taxi trajectory data from Beijing, further verifying the practicality of the proposed method.