  Traffic volume is an indispensable ingredient to provide fine-grained
information for traffic management and control. However, due to limited
deployment of traffic sensors, obtaining full-scale volume information is far
from easy. Existing works on this topic primarily focus on improving the
overall estimation accuracy of a particular method and ignore the underlying
challenges of volume estimation, thereby having inferior performances on some
critical tasks. This paper studies two key problems with regard to traffic
volume estimation: (1) underdetermined traffic flows caused by undetected
movements, and (2) non-equilibrium traffic flows arise from congestion
propagation. Here we demonstrate a graph-based deep learning method that can
offer a data-driven, model-free and correlation adaptive approach to tackle the
above issues and perform accurate network-wide traffic volume estimation.
Particularly, in order to quantify the dynamic and nonlinear relationships
between traffic speed and volume for the estimation of underdetermined flows, a
speed patternadaptive adjacent matrix based on graph attention is developed and
integrated into the graph convolution process, to capture non-local
correlations between sensors. To measure the impacts of non-equilibrium flows,
a temporal masked and clipped attention combined with a gated temporal
convolution layer is customized to capture time-asynchronous correlations
between upstream and downstream sensors. We then evaluate our model on a
real-world highway traffic volume dataset and compare it with several benchmark
models. It is demonstrated that the proposed model achieves high estimation
accuracy even under 20% sensor coverage rate and outperforms other baselines
significantly, especially on underdetermined and non-equilibrium flow
locations. Furthermore, comprehensive quantitative model analysis are also
carried out to justify the model designs.
