This paper details our solution to Traffic4cast 2020. Similar to Traffic4cast 2019, Traffic4cast 2020 challenged its contestants to develop algorithms that can predict the future traffic states of big cities. Our team tackled this challenge on two fronts. We studied the importance of feature and loss function design, and achieved significant improvement to the best performing U-Net solution from last year. We also explored the use of Graph Neural Networks and introduced a novel ensemble GNN architecture which outperformed the GNN solution from last year. While our GNN was improved, it was still unable to match the performance of U-Nets and the potential reasons for this shortfall were discussed. Our final solution, an ensemble of our U-Net and GNN, achieved the 4th place solution in Traffic4cast 2020.
Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）
Deep-learning-based data-driven forecasting methods have produced impressive results for traffic forecasting. A major limitation of these methods, however, is that they provide forecasts without estimates of uncertainty, which are critical for real-time deployments. We focus on a diffusion convolutional recurrent neural network (DCRNN), a state-of-the-art method for short-term traffic forecasting. We develop a scalable deep ensemble approach to quantify uncertainties for DCRNN. Our approach uses a scalable Bayesian optimization method to perform hyperparameter optimization, selects a set of hi…
With the rapid growth of traffic sensors deployed, a massive amount of traffic flow data are collected, revealing the long-term evolution of traffic flows and the gradual expansion of traffic networks. How to accurately forecasting these traffic flow attracts the attention of researchers as it is of great significance for improving the efficiency of transportation systems. However, existing methods mainly focus on the spatial-temporal correlation of static networks, leaving the problem of efficiently learning models on networks with expansion and evolving patterns less studied. To tackle this …
Traffic forecasting is a core element of intelligent traffic monitoring system. Approaches based on graph neural networks have been widely used in this task to effectively capture spatial and temporal dependencies of road networks. However, these approaches can not effectively define the complicated network topology. Besides, their cascade network structures have limitations in transmitting distinct features in the time and space dimensions. In this paper, we propose a Multi-adaptive Spatiotemporal-flow Graph Neural Network (MAF-GNN) for traffic speed forecasting. MAF-GNN introduces an effecti…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
Traffic classification associates packet streams with known application labels, which is vital for network security and network management. With the rise of NAT, port dynamics, and encrypted traffic, it is increasingly challenging to obtain unified traffic features for accurate classification. Many state-of-the-art traffic classifiers automatically extract features from the packet stream based on deep learning models such as convolution networks. Unfortunately, the compositional and causal relationships between packets are not well extracted in these deep learning models, which affects both pr…
Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）
Wide area networking infrastructures (WANs), particularly science and research WANs, are the backbone for moving large volumes of scientific data between experimental facilities and data centers. With demands growing at exponential rates, these networks are struggling to cope with large data volumes, real-time responses, and overall network performance. Network operators are increasingly looking for innovative ways to manage the limited underlying network resources. Forecasting network traffic is a critical capability for proactive resource management, congestion mitigation, and dedicated tran…
Traffic signal control is a significant part of the construction of intelligent transportation. An efficient traffic signal control strategy can reduce traffic congestion, improve urban road traffic efficiency and facilitate people's lives. Existing reinforcement learning approaches for traffic signal control mainly focus on learning through a separate neural network. Such an independent neural network may fall into the local optimum of the training results. Worse more, the collected data can only be sampled once, so the data utilization rate is low. Therefore, we propose the Random Ensemble D…
Aimsun SLU（Aimsun SLU公司）；DeustoTech（德乌斯托技术中心）；Faculty of Engineering, University of Deusto（德乌斯托大学工程学院）；University of Deusto（德乌斯托大学）；IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science（巴斯克科学基金会IKERBASQUE）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）
Intelligent Transportation Systems are producing tons of hardly manageable traffic data, which motivates the use of Machine Learning (ML) for data-driven applications, such as Traffic Forecasting (TF). TF is gaining relevance due to its ability to mitigate traffic congestion by forecasting future traffic states. However, TF poses one big challenge to the ML paradigm, known as the Model Selection Problem (MSP): deciding the most suitable combination of data preprocessing techniques and ML method for traffic data collected under different transportation circumstances. In this context, Automated …
IBM Research AI（IBM研究AI）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）
Air traffic control is an example of a highly challenging operational problem that is readily amenable to human expertise augmentation via decision support technologies. In this paper, we propose a new intelligent decision making framework that leverages multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to dynamically suggest adjustments of aircraft speeds in real-time. The goal of the system is to enhance the ability of an air traffic controller to provide effective guidance to aircraft to avoid air traffic congestion, near-miss situations, and to improve arrival timeliness. We develop a novel deep e…
University of Western Ontario（西安大略大学）；Juniper Networks（瞻博网络）
Prediction of network traffic behavior is significant for the effective management of modern telecommunication networks. However, the intuitive approach of predicting network traffic using administrative experience and market analysis data is inadequate for an efficient forecast framework. As a result, many different mathematical models have been studied to capture the general trend of the network traffic and predict accordingly. But the comprehensive performance analysis of varying regression models and their ensemble has not been studied before for analyzing real-world anomalous traffic. In …
Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology（哈瓦贾·法里德工程与信息技术大学）；Islamia University Bahawalpur（巴哈瓦尔布尔伊斯兰大学）
Rapid increase of traffic volume on urban roads over time has changed the traffic scenario globally. It has also increased the ratio of road accidents that can be severe and fatal in the worst case. To improve traffic safety and its management on urban roads, there is a need for prediction of severity level of accidents. Various machine learning models are being used for accident prediction. In this study, tree based ensemble models (Random Forest, AdaBoost, Extra Tree, and Gradient Boosting) and ensemble of two statistical models (Logistic Regression Stochastic Gradient Descent) as voting cla…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；New York University Tandon School of Engineering（纽约大学坦登工程学院）
This paper addresses the problem of short-term traffic prediction for signalized traffic operations management. Specifically, we focus on predicting sensor states in high-resolution (second-by-second). This contrasts with traditional traffic forecasting problems, which have focused on predicting aggregated traffic variables, typically over intervals that are no shorter than 5 minutes. Our contributions can be summarized as offering three insights: first, we show how the prediction problem can be modeled as a matrix completion problem. Second, we employ a block-coordinate descent algorithm and …
Physics-Informed Teacher-Student Ensemble Learning for Traffic State Estimation with a Varying Speed Limit Scenario
Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Concordia University（康科迪亚大学建筑、土木和环境工程系）；Urban Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学城市人工智能实验室）；Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering, University of Central Florida（中央佛罗里达大学土木、环境和建设工程系）
Bolt Technology（博尔特科技）；University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）
Accurate traffic forecasting is of the utmost importance for optimal travel planning and for efficient city mobility. IARAI (The Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence) organizes Traffic4cast, a yearly traffic prediction competition based on real-life data [https://www.iarai.ac.at/traffic4cast/], aiming to leverage artificial intelligence advances for producing accurate traffic estimates. We present our solution to the IARAI Traffic4cast 2022 competition, in which the goal is to develop algorithms for predicting road graph edge congestion classes and supersegment-level trave…
Monitoring network traffic to identify content, services, and applications is an active research topic in network traffic control systems. While modern firewalls provide the capability to decrypt packets, this is not appealing for privacy advocates. Hence, identifying any information from encrypted traffic is a challenging task. Nonetheless, previous work has identified machine learning methods that may enable application and service identification. The process involves high level feature extraction from network packet data then training a robust machine learning classifier for traffic identif…
Predicting traffic volume in real-time can improve both traffic flow and road safety. A precise traffic volume forecast helps alert drivers to the flow of traffic along their preferred routes, preventing potential deadlock situations. Existing parametric models cannot reliably forecast traffic volume in dynamic and complex traffic conditions. Therefore, in order to evaluate and forecast the traffic volume for every given time step in a real-time manner, we develop non-linear memory-based deep neural network models. Our extensive experiments run on the Metro Interstate Traffic Volume dataset de…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of California Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）
With the improvements of Los Angeles in many aspects, people in mounting numbers tend to live or travel to the city. The primary objective of this paper is to apply a set of methods for the time series analysis of traffic accidents in Los Angeles in the past few years. The number of traffic accidents, collected from 2010 to 2019 monthly reveals that the traffic accident happens seasonally and increasing with fluctuation. This paper utilizes the ensemble methods to combine several different methods to model the data from various perspectives, which can lead to better forecasting accuracy. The I…
We present a novel data-driven approach of learning traffic flow patterns of a transportation network given that many instances of origin to destination (OD) travel demand and link flows of the network are available. Instead of estimating traffic flow patterns assuming certain user behavior (e.g., user equilibrium or system optimal), here we explore the idea of learning those flow patterns directly from the data. To implement this idea, we have formulated the traffic-assignment problem as a data-driven learning problem and developed a neural network-based framework known as Graph Convolutional…
Predicting large-scale transportation network traffic has become an important and challenging topic in recent decades. Inspired by the domain knowledge of motion prediction, in which the future motion of an object can be predicted based on previous scenes, we propose a network grid representation method that can retain the fine-scale structure of a transportation network. Network-wide traffic speeds are converted into a series of static images and input into a novel deep architecture, namely, spatiotemporal recurrent convolutional networks (SRCNs), for traffic forecasting. The proposed SRCNs i…
Traffic prediction is an important and yet highly challenging problem due to the complexity and constantly changing nature of traffic systems. To address the challenges, we propose a graph and attentive multi-path convolutional network (GAMCN) model to predict traffic conditions such as traffic speed across a given road network into the future. Our model focuses on the spatial and temporal factors that impact traffic conditions. To model the spatial factors, we propose a variant of the graph convolutional network (GCN) named LPGCN to embed road network graph vertices into a latent space, where…
University of Western Ontario（西安大略大学）；Juniper Networks（瞻博网络）
Efficient prediction of internet traffic is essential for ensuring proactive management of computer networks. Nowadays, machine learning approaches show promising performance in modeling real-world complex traffic. However, most existing works assumed that model training and evaluation data came from identical distribution. But in practice, there is a high probability that the model will deal with data from a slightly or entirely unknown distribution in the deployment phase. This paper investigated and evaluated machine learning performances using eXtreme Gradient Boosting, Light Gradient Boos…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Accurate traffic prediction is crucial to the guidance and management of urban traffics. However, most of the existing traffic prediction models do not consider the computational burden and memory space when they capture spatial-temporal dependence among traffic data. In this work, we propose a factorized Spatial-Temporal Tensor Graph Convolutional Network to deal with traffic speed prediction. Traffic networks are modeled and unified into a graph that integrates spatial and temporal information simultaneously. We further extend graph convolution into tensor space and propose a tensor graph co…
Short-term traffic forecasting based on deep learning methods, especially long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks, has received much attention in recent years. However, the potential of deep learning methods in traffic forecasting has not yet fully been exploited in terms of the depth of the model architecture, the spatial scale of the prediction area, and the predictive power of spatial-temporal data. In this paper, a deep stacked bidirectional and unidirectional LSTM (SBU- LSTM) neural network architecture is proposed, which considers both forward and backward dependencies in time seri…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；INRIX, Inc.（因瑞克斯公司）
Traffic forecasting is a particularly challenging application of spatiotemporal forecasting, due to the time-varying traffic patterns and the complicated spatial dependencies on road networks. To address this challenge, we learn the traffic network as a graph and propose a novel deep learning framework, Traffic Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network (TGC-LSTM), to learn the interactions between roadways in the traffic network and forecast the network-wide traffic state. We define the traffic graph convolution based on the physical network topology. The relationship between t…
Neural networks have become an increasingly popular solution for network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). Their capability of learning complex patterns and behaviors make them a suitable solution for differentiating between normal traffic and network attacks. However, a drawback of neural networks is the amount of resources needed to train them. Many network gateways and routers devices, which could potentially host an NIDS, simply do not have the memory or processing power to train and sometimes even execute such models. More importantly, the existing neural network solutions are trained i…
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（本-古里安大学）；Dept. of Software and Information Systems Eng.（软件与信息系统工程系）
We present the Network Traffic Generator (NTG), a framework for perturbing recorded network traffic with the purpose of generating diverse but realistic background traffic for network simulation and what-if analysis in enterprise environments. The framework preserves many characteristics of the original traffic recorded in an enterprise, as well as sequences of network activities. Using the proposed framework, the original traffic flows are profiled using 200 cross-protocol features. The traffic is aggregated into flows of packets between IP pairs and clustered into groups of similar network a…
Accurate traffic prediction is a key ingredient to enable traffic management like rerouting cars to reduce road congestion or regulating traffic via dynamic speed limits to maintain a steady flow. A way to represent traffic data is in the form of temporally changing heatmaps visualizing attributes of traffic, such as speed and volume. In recent works, U-Net models have shown SOTA performance on traffic forecasting from heatmaps. We propose to combine the U-Net architecture with graph layers which improves spatial generalization to unseen road networks compared to a Vanilla U-Net. In particular…
Université Savoie Mont Blanc（萨瓦勃朗峰大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
Network management often relies on machine learning to make predictions about performance and security from network traffic. Often, the representation of the traffic is as important as the choice of the model. The features that the model relies on, and the representation of those features, ultimately determine model accuracy, as well as where and whether the model can be deployed in practice. Thus, the design and evaluation of these models ultimately requires understanding not only model accuracy but also the systems costs associated with deploying the model in an operational network. Towards …
This paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method that learns traffic as images and predicts large-scale, network-wide traffic speed with a high accuracy. Spatiotemporal traffic dynamics are converted to images describing the time and space relations of traffic flow via a two-dimensional time-space matrix. A CNN is applied to the image following two consecutive steps: abstract traffic feature extraction and network-wide traffic speed prediction. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by taking two real-world transportation networks, the second ring road and n…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Traffic forecasting is a classical task for traffic management and it plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems. However, since traffic data are mostly collected by traffic sensors or probe vehicles, sensor failures and the lack of probe vehicles will inevitably result in missing values in the collected raw data for some specific links in the traffic network. Although missing values can be imputed, existing data imputation methods normally need long-term historical traffic state data. As for short-term traffic forecasting, especially under edge computing and online predicti…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
In traffic forecasting, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which model traffic flows as spatio-temporal graphs, have achieved remarkable performance. However, existing GCN-based methods heuristically define the graph structure as the physical topology of the road network, ignoring potential dependence of the graph structure over traffic data. And the defined graph structure is deterministic, which lacks investigation of uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (BSTGCN) for traffic prediction. The graph structure in our network is learned f…
Network Traffic Matrix (TM) prediction is defined as the problem of estimating future network traffic from the previous and achieved network traffic data. It is widely used in network planning, resource management and network security. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is a specific recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture that is well-suited to learn from experience to classify, process and predict time series with time lags of unknown size. LSTMs have been shown to model temporal sequences and their long-range dependencies more accurately than conventional RNNs. In this paper, we propose a LS…
This paper describes our UNet based deep convolutional neural network approach on the Traffic4cast challenge 2019. Challenges task is to predict future traffic flow volume, heading and speed on high resolution whole city map. We used UNet based deep convolutional neural network to train predictive model for the short term traffic forecast. On each convolution block, layers are densely connected with subsequent layers like a DenseNet. Trained and evaluated on the real world data set collected from three distinct cities in the world, our method achieved best performance in this challenge.
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Traffic forecasting problem remains a challenging task in the intelligent transportation system due to its spatio-temporal complexity. Although temporal dependency has been well studied and discussed, spatial dependency is relatively less explored due to its large variations, especially in the urban environment. In this study, a novel graph convolutional network model, Multi-Weight Traffic Graph Convolutional (MW-TGC) network, is proposed and applied to two urban networks with contrasting geometric constraints. The model conducts graph convolution operations on speed data with multi-weighted a…
Traffic speed prediction is a critically important component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Recently, with the rapid development of deep learning and transportation data science, a growing body of new traffic speed prediction models have been designed, which achieved high accuracy and large-scale prediction. However, existing studies have two major limitations. First, they predict aggregated traffic speed rather than lane-level traffic speed; second, most studies ignore the impact of other traffic flow parameters in speed prediction. To address these issues, we propose a two-stre…
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Telecom Paris（巴黎电信学院）
With more encrypted network traffic gets involved in the Internet, how to effectively identify network traffic has become a top priority in the field. Accurate identification of the network traffic is the footstone of basic network services, say QoE, bandwidth allocation, and IDS. Previous identification methods either cannot deal with encrypted traffics or require experts to select tons of features to attain a relatively decent accuracy.In this paper, we present a Deep Learning based end-to-end network traffic identification framework, termed TEST, to avoid the aforementioned problems. CNN an…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been applied and shown great potential in multi-intersections traffic signal control, where multiple agents, one for each intersection, must cooperate together to optimize traffic flow. To encourage global cooperation, previous work partitions the traffic network into several regions and learns policies for agents in a feudal structure. However, static network partition fails to adapt to dynamic traffic flow, which will changes frequently over time. To address this, we propose a novel feudal MARL approach with adaptive network partition. Specifical…
Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）
Traffic forecasting approaches are critical to developing adaptive strategies for mobility. Traffic patterns have complex spatial and temporal dependencies that make accurate forecasting on large highway networks a challenging task. Recently, diffusion convolutional recurrent neural networks (DCRNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in traffic forecasting by capturing the spatiotemporal dynamics of the traffic. Despite the promising results, however, applying DCRNNs for large highway networks still remains elusive because of computational and memory bottlenecks. We present an approach fo…
Dynamic Causal Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Prediction
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Cologne（科隆大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Qing Yuan Research Institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学清源研究院）
Machine learning (ML) started to become widely deployed in cyber security settings for shortening the detection cycle of cyber attacks. To date, most ML-based systems are either proprietary or make specific choices of feature representations and machine learning models. The success of these techniques is difficult to assess as public benchmark datasets are currently unavailable. In this paper, we provide concrete guidelines and recommendations for using supervised ML in cyber security. As a case study, we consider the problem of botnet detection from network traffic data. Among our findings we…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
Accurate traffic speed prediction is an important and challenging topic for transportation planning. Previous studies on traffic speed prediction predominately used spatio-temporal and context features for prediction. However, they have not made good use of the impact of urban traffic incidents. In this work, we aim to make use of the information of urban incidents to achieve a better prediction of traffic speed. Our incident-driven prediction framework consists of three processes. First, we propose a critical incident discovery method to discover urban traffic incidents with high impact on tr…
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）
Accurate forecasting of traffic conditions is critical for improving safety, stability, and efficiency of a city transportation system. In reality, it is challenging to produce accurate traffic forecasts due to the complex and dynamic spatiotemporal correlations. Most existing works only consider partial characteristics and features of traffic data, and result in unsatisfactory performances on modeling and forecasting. In this paper, we propose a periodic spatial-temporal deep neural network (PSTN) with three pivotal modules to improve the forecasting performance of traffic conditions through …
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Survey, Mapping and Remote Sensing（测绘遥感信息工程国家重点实验室）
Traffic forecasting is crucial for urban traffic management and guidance. However, existing methods rarely exploit the time-frequency properties of traffic speed observations, and often neglect the propagation of traffic flows from upstream to downstream road segments. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach that learns the spatio-temporal dependency in traffic flows and predicts short-term traffic speeds on a road network. Specifically, we employ wavelet transform to decompose raw traffic data into several components with different frequency sub-bands. A Motif-based Graph Convolutional Re…
Transportation networks are highly complex and the design of efficient traffic management systems is difficult due to lack of adequate measured data and accurate predictions of the traffic states. Traffic simulation models can capture the complex dynamics of transportation networks by using limited available traffic data and can help central traffic authorities in their decision-making, if appropriate input is fed into the simulator. In this paper, we design an integrated simulation-prediction system which estimates the Origin-Destination (OD) matrix of a road network using only flow rate info…
