Low-Rank Tensor Completion With 3-D Spatiotemporal Transform for Traffic Data Imputation

In recent years, the imputation of spatiotemporal traffic data has emerged as a critical area of research within intelligent transportation systems. A commonly employed approach is low-rank matrix/tensor completion combined with additional spatiotemporal regularization techniques. However, many existing methods simply incorporate these regularizations into the low-rank model, resulting in models that are highly sensitive to trade-off parameters and yield mediocre results. Motivated by this problem, in this paper, we propose a method called Low-Rank Tensor Completion with 3D Spatiotemporal Transform (LRTC-3DST) for traffic data imputation, which effectively integrates low-rankness with three types of spatiotemporal characteristics in a fused manner and thus avoids trade-off parameters. We first design three specific transformations including graph Laplacian transform, fractional difference transform and periodic circulant transform for encoding the spatial local consistency, temporal local consistency and approximate periodicity of 3D traffic data, respectively. Then the LRTC-3DST model is proposed by using the truncated tensor nuclear norm on the three spatiotemporal feature tensors. The proposed model is optimized via the alternating direction multipliers method. Extensive experiments on a series of real traffic datasets demonstrate that our LRTC-3DST significantly outperforms numerous related methods, even when the missing rate is as high as
$99\%$
. The code is available at https://github.com/HaoShu2000/LRTC-3DST.