Modeling Route Representation With Mixed-Scale Hierarchical Transformer

Modeling route representation aims to obtain contextual representations of an entire route for various traffic-related tasks. In reality, spatial-temporal data often exhibits multi-scale characteristics, which are utilized by many studies to enhance their performance. However, there is still a lack of in-depth research on how to effectively incorporate the multi-scale spatial-temporal information into transformer structure to adequately model route representation. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical route representation framework called RouteMT, which effectively captures multi-scale spatial-temporal characteristics of routes and leverages a mixed-scale transformer architecture to fuse intra and interroute features. Experiments on real data confirm RouteMT’s superior performance and versatility.