Enhancing Dependency Dynamics in Traffic Flow Forecasting via Graph Risk Bootstrap

Graph neural networks, as well as attention mechanisms, have gained widespread popularity for traffic flow forecasting due to their capacity to incorporate the complicated interactions behind flow dynamics. However, existing solutions either formulate a graph-based skeleton with narrow (e.g., static) interaction capture or build the spatiotemporal (e.g., dynamic) attention without proper comprehension of diverse risks, which inevitably burdens the generalization of high-accuracy traffic trends. In this study, we introduce Gboot (Graph bootstrap) enhancement framework for traffic flow forecasting. Gboot takes the traffic flow forecasting problem from a dependency dynamic learning perspective by treating each traffic sensor as the graph node while regarding the observed flows at each sensor as the node feature. In addition to exposing the explicit spatial connectivity behind traffic flows, we hierarchically devise temporal-aware and factual-aware graph learning blocks to consider temporal interactive dynamics and factual interactive dynamics. The former shows the trend dependencies behind flow signals and the latter uncovers different views of traffic situations (e.g., current observation vs. historical observation). More importantly, we present a Dual-view Bootstrap (DvBoot) mechanism in Gboot, which includes both risk-free and risk-aware stands. DvBoot attempts to flexibly align these two views in the latent space to enhance the generalization capability of capturing dynamic dependencies. Experiments on several real-world traffic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our Gboot over representative approaches.