Convolutional Neural Network-Based Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit–Additive Attention Mechanism Hybrid Deep Neural Networks for Short-Term Traffic Flow Prediction

To more accurately predict short-term traffic flow, this study posits a sophisticated integrated prediction model, CNN-BiGRU-AAM, based on the additive attention mechanism of a convolutional bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural network. This model seeks to enhance the precision of traffic flow prediction by integrating both historical and prospective data. Specifically, the model achieves prediction through two steps: encoding and decoding. In the encoding phase, convolutional neural networks are used to extract spatial correlations between weather and traffic flow in the input sequence, while the BiGRU model captures temporal correlations in the time series. In the decoding phase, an additive attention mechanism is introduced to weigh and fuse the encoded features. The experimental results demonstrate that the CNN-BiGRU model, coupled with the additive attention mechanism, is capable of dynamically capturing the temporal patterns of traffic flow, and the introduction of isolation forests can effectively handle data anomalies and missing values, improving prediction accuracy. Compared to benchmark models such as GRU, the CNN-BiGRU-AAM model shows significant improvement on the test set, with a 47.49 reduction in the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), a 30.72 decrease in the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and a 5.27% reduction in the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The coefficient of determination ( R 2 ) reaches 0.97, indicating the high accuracy of the CNN-BiGRU-AAM model in traffic flow prediction. It provides a good solution for short-term traffic flow with spatio-temporal features, thereby enhancing the efficiency of traffic management and planning and promoting the sustainable development of transportation.