Effective and Efficient Cross-City Traffic Knowledge Transfer: A Privacy-Preserving Perspective

Traffic prediction aims to forecast future traffic conditions using historical traffic data, serving a crucial role in urban computing and transportation management. While transfer learning and federated learning have been employed to address the scarcity of traffic data by transferring traffic knowledge from data-rich to data-scarce cities without traffic data exchange, existing approaches in Federated Traffic Knowledge Transfer (FTT) still face several critical challenges such as potential privacy leakage, cross-city data distribution discrepancies, and low data quality, hindering their practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we present FedTT, a novel privacy-aware and efficient federated learning framework for cross-city traffic knowledge transfer. Specifically, our proposed framework includes three key innovations: (i) a traffic view imputation method for missing traffic data completion to enhance data quality, (ii) a traffic domain adapter for uniform traffic data transformation to address data distribution discrepancies, and (iii) a traffic secret aggregation protocol for secure traffic data aggregation to safeguard data privacy. Extensive experiments on 4 real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed FedTT framework outperforms the 14 state-of-the-art baselines.