Online Transfer Learning with MLP-Assisted Graph Convolution Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting: A Solution for Edge Intelligent Devices

Traffic flow prediction is crucial for intelligent transportation and aids in route planning and navigation. However, existing studies often focus on prediction accuracy improvement, while neglecting external influences and practical issues like resource constraints and data sparsity on edge devices. We propose an online transfer learning (OTL) framework with a multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-assisted graph convolutional network (GCN), termed OTL-GM, which consists of two parts: transferring source-domain features to edge devices and using online learning to bridge domain gaps. Experiments on four data sets demonstrate OTL’s effectiveness; in a comparison with models not using OTL, the reduction in the convergence time of the OTL models ranges from 24.77% to 95.32%.