Authors
Chenhan Zhang, Shuyu Zhang, James J.Q. Yu*, and Shui Yu

Publication
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, Volume 17, Issue 12, December 2021, Pages 8464--8474

Abstract
Federated learning has been applied to various tasks in intelligent transportation systems to protect data privacy through decentralized training schemes. The majority of the state-of-the-art models in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are graph neural networks (GNN)-based for spatial information learning. When applying federated learning to the ITS tasks with GNN-based models, the existing frameworks can only protect the data privacy; however, ignore the one of topological information of transportation networks. In this work, we propose a novel federated learning framework to tackle this problem. Specifically, we introduce a differential privacy-based adjacency matrix preserving approach for protecting the topological information. We also propose an adjacency matrix aggregation approach to allow local GNN-based models to access the global network for a better training effect. Furthermore, we propose a GNN-based model named Attention-based Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (ASTGNN) for traffic speed forecasting. We integrate the proposed federated learning framework and ASTGNN as FASTGNN for traffic speed forecasting. Extensive case studies on a real-world dataset demonstrate that FASTGNN can develop accurate forecasting under the privacy preservation constraint.