Deep learning-powered vessel traffic flow prediction with spatial-temporal attributes and similarity grouping

Perceiving the future trend of Vessel Traffic Flow (VTF) in advance has great application values in the maritime industry. However, using such big data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) for accurate VTF prediction remains challenging. Deep training networks can learn valuable features from extensive historical data. This paper proposes a new learning-based prediction network, improved Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with similarity grouping, including three views. To effectively enable the training network to capture the temporal and periodic (i.e. a spatial attribute) change characteristics of VTF, the CNN and LSTM are employed to compose spatial and temporal views, respectively. Hence, the original one-dimensional data is transformed into a matrix (hour of the day ✕ day) to adapt the input of the proposed methodology. In practical applications, VTF of multiple adjacent target regions need to be predicted simultaneously, and the changes of VTF in different areas may influence each other. To explore their hidden relationships, the similarity grouping view aims to find the target area that exhibits the most similarity with the VTF change trend of the current research area. Furthermore, similar information is combined with the features generated from the other two views to obtain the prediction results. In summary, the new advantage lies in mining the spatiotemporal attributes of data and fusing the similarity information of adjacent regions. Comparative experiments with eleven other methods on realistic VTF datasets show that the proposed method demonstrates superior prediction accuracy and stability performance.