ST-TAR: An Efficient Spatio-Temporal Learning Framework for Traffic Accident Risk Forecasting

Abstract

Traffic accidents represent a significant concern due to their devastating consequences. The ability to predict future traffic accident risks is of key importance to accident prevention activities in transportation systems. Although existing studies have made substantial efforts to model spatio-temporal correlations, they fall short when it comes to addressing the zero-inflated data issue and capturing spatio-temporal heterogeneity, which reduces their predictive abilities. In addition, improving efficiency is an urgent requirement for traffic accident forecasting. To overcome these limitations, we propose an efficient Spatio-Temporal learning framework for Traffic Accident Risk forecasting (ST-TAR). Taking long-term and short-term data as separate inputs, the ST-TAR model integrates hierarchical multi-view GCN and long short-term cross-attention mechanism to encode spatial dependencies and temporal patterns. We leverage long-term periodicity and short-term proximity for spatio-temporal contrastive learning to capture spatio-temporal heterogeneity. A tailored adaptive risk-level weighted loss function based on efficient locality-sensitive hashing is introduced to alleviate the zero-inflated issue. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets offer evidence that ST-TAR is capable of advancing state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy with improved efficiency. This makes ST-TAR suitable for applications that require accurate real-time forecasting.