traffic flow prediction
HSTMixer: A Hierarchical MLP-Mixer for Large-Scale Traffic Forecasting
Wang, Yongyao, Wang, Jingyuan, Yu, Xie, Ji, Jiahao, Li, Chao
Traffic forecasting task is significant to modern urban management. Recently, there is growing attention on large-scale forecasting, as it better reflects the complexity of real-world traffic networks. However, existing models often exhibit quadratic computational complexity, making them impractical for large-scale real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Mixer (HSTMixer), which leverages an all-MLP architecture for efficient and effective large-scale traffic forecasting. HSTMixer employs a hierarchical spatiotemporal mixing block to extract multi-resolution features through bottom-up aggregation and top-down propagation. Furthermore, an adaptive region mixer generates transformation matrices based on regional semantics, enabling our model to dynamically capture evolving spatiotemporal patterns for different regions. Extensive experiments conducted on four large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also exhibits competitive computational efficiency.
Cross-Modal Reconstruction Pretraining for Ramp Flow Prediction at Highway Interchanges
Li, Yongchao, Chen, Jun, Li, Zhuoxuan, Gao, Chao, Li, Yang, Zhang, Chu, Dong, Changyin
Interchanges are crucial nodes for vehicle transfers between highways, yet the lack of real-time ramp detectors creates blind spots in traffic prediction. To address this, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Decoupled Autoencoder (STDAE), a two-stage framework that leverages cross-modal reconstruction pretraining. In the first stage, STDAE reconstructs historical ramp flows from mainline data, forcing the model to capture intrinsic spatio-temporal relations. Its decoupled architecture with parallel spatial and temporal autoencoders efficiently extracts heterogeneous features. In the prediction stage, the learned representations are integrated with models such as GWNet to enhance accuracy. Experiments on three real-world interchange datasets show that STDAE-GWNET consistently outperforms thirteen state-of-the-art baselines and achieves performance comparable to models using historical ramp data. This demonstrates its effectiveness in overcoming detector scarcity and its plug-and-play potential for diverse forecasting pipelines.
How does the Performance of the Data-driven Traffic Flow Forecasting Models deteriorate with Increasing Forecasting Horizon? An Extensive Approach Considering Statistical, Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models
Sherfenaz, Amanta, Haque, Nazmul, Prova, Protiva Sadhukhan, Raihan, Md Asif, Hadiuzzaman, Md.
With rapid urbanization in recent decades, traffic congestion has intensified due to increased movement of people and goods. As planning shifts from demand-based to supply-oriented strategies, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have become essential for managing traffic within existing infrastructure. A core ITS function is traffic forecasting, enabling proactive measures like ramp metering, signal control, and dynamic routing through platforms such as Google Maps. This study assesses the performance of statistical, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) models in forecasting traffic speed and flow using real-world data from California's Harbor Freeway, sourced from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS). Each model was evaluated over 20 forecasting windows (up to 1 hour 40 minutes) using RMSE, MAE, and R-Square metrics. Results show ANFIS-GP performs best at early windows with RMSE of 0.038, MAE of 0.0276, and R-Square of 0.9983, while Bi-LSTM is more robust for medium-term prediction due to its capacity to model long-range temporal dependencies, achieving RMSE of 0.1863, MAE of 0.0833, and R-Square of 0.987 at a forecasting of 20. The degradation in model performance was quantified using logarithmic transformation, with slope values used to measure robustness. Among DL models, Bi-LSTM had the flattest slope (0.0454 RMSE, 0.0545 MAE for flow), whereas ANFIS-GP had 0.1058 for RMSE and 0.1037 for flow MAE. The study concludes by identifying hybrid models as a promising future direction.
STGAtt: A Spatial-Temporal Unified Graph Attention Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting
Liang, Zhuding, Cui, Jianxun, Zeng, Qingshuang, Liu, Feng, Filipovic, Nenad, Geroski, Tijana
Accurate and timely traffic flow forecasting is crucial for intelligent transportation systems. This paper presents a novel deep learning model, the Spatial-Temporal Unified Graph Attention Network (STGAtt). By leveraging a unified graph representation and an attention mechanism, STGAtt effectively captures complex spatial-temporal dependencies. Unlike methods relying on separate spatial and temporal dependency modeling modules, STGAtt directly models correlations within a Spatial-Temporal Unified Graph, dynamically weighing connections across both dimensions. To further enhance its capabilities, STGAtt partitions traffic flow observation signal into neighborhood subsets and employs a novel exchanging mechanism, enabling effective capture of both short-range and long-range correlations. Extensive experiments on the PEMS-BAY and SHMetro datasets demonstrate STGAtt's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines across various prediction horizons. Visualization of attention weights confirms STGAtt's ability to adapt to dynamic traffic patterns and capture long-range dependencies, highlighting its potential for real-world traffic flow forecasting applications.
Dynamic Campus Origin-Destination Mobility Prediction using Graph Convolutional Neural Network on WiFi Logs
Badu-Marfo, Godwin, Farooq, Bilal
We present an integrated graph-based neural networks architecture for predicting campus buildings occupancy and inter-buildings movement at dynamic temporal resolution that learns traffic flow patterns from Wi-Fi logs combined with the usage schedules within the buildings. The relative traffic flows are directly estimated from the WiFi data without assuming the occupant behaviour or preferences while maintaining individual privacy. We formulate the problem as a data-driven graph structure represented by a set of nodes (representing buildings), connected through a route of edges or links using a novel Graph Convolution plus LSTM Neural Network (GCLSTM) which has shown remarkable success in modelling complex patterns. We describe the formulation, model estimation, interpretability and examine the relative performance of our proposed model. We also present an illustrative architecture of the models and apply on real-world WiFi logs collected at the Toronto Metropolitan University campus. The results of the experiments show that the integrated GCLSTM models significantly outperform traditional pedestrian flow estimators like the Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Linear Regression.
DKGCM: A Spatio-Temporal Prediction Model for Traffic Flow by Fusing Spatial Node Clustering Method and Fourier Bidirectional Mamba Mechanism
Long, Siqing, Huang, Xiangzhi, Xie, Jiemin, Cai, Ming
Accurate traffic demand forecasting enables transportation management departments to allocate resources more effectively, thereby improving their utilization efficiency. However, complex spatiotemporal relationships in traffic systems continue to limit the performance of demand forecasting models. To improve the accuracy of spatiotemporal traffic demand prediction, we propose a new graph convolutional network structure called DKGCM. Specifically, we first consider the spatial flow distribution of different traffic nodes and propose a novel temporal similarity-based clustering graph convolution method, DK-GCN. This method utilizes Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and K-means clustering to group traffic nodes and more effectively capture spatial dependencies. On the temporal scale, we integrate the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) within the bidirectional Mamba deep learning framework to capture temporal dependencies in traffic demand. To further optimize model training, we incorporate the GRPO reinforcement learning strategy to enhance the loss function feedback mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms several advanced methods and achieves strong results on three public datasets.
PPTNet: A Hybrid Periodic Pattern-Transformer Architecture for Traffic Flow Prediction and Congestion Identification
Kou, Hongrui, Li, Jingkai, Wang, Ziyu, Lv, Zhouhang, Zhang, Yuxin, Wang, Cheng
--Accurate prediction of traffic flow parameters and real-time identification of congestion states are essential for the efficient operation of intelligent transportation systems. This paper proposes a Periodic Pattern-Transformer Network (PPTNet) for traffic flow prediction, integrating periodic pattern extraction with the Transformer architecture, coupled with a fuzzy inference method for real-time congestion identification. Firstly, a high-precision traffic flow dataset (Traffic Flow Dataset for China's Congested Highways & Expressways, TF4CHE) suitable for congested highway scenarios in China is constructed based on drone aerial imagery data. Subsequently, the proposed PPTNet employs Fast Fourier Transform to capture multi-scale periodic patterns and utilizes two-dimensional Inception convolutions to efficiently extract intra and inter periodic features. Finally, congestion probabilities are calculated in real-time using the predicted outcomes via a Mamdani fuzzy inference-based congestion identification module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PPTNet significantly outperforms mainstream traffic prediction methods in prediction accuracy, and the congestion identification module effectively identifies real-time road congestion states, verifying the superiority and practicality of the proposed method in real-world traffic scenarios. ITH the rapid advancement of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), traffic flow prediction has become a core technology to optimize traffic management and improve operational efficiency [1]. As a critical component of national transportation infrastructure, expressways are particularly susceptible to traffic congestion, which not only directly reduces throughput but also indirectly contributes to a higher incidence of traffic accidents.
A Time-Enhanced Data Disentanglement Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting
Jiang, Tianfan, Wu, Mei, Weng, Wenchao, Seng, Dewen, Lin, Yiqian
In recent years, traffic flow prediction has become a highlight in the field of intelligent transportation systems. However, due to the temporal variations and dynamic spatial correlations of traffic data, traffic prediction remains highly challenging.Traditional spatiotemporal networks, which rely on end-to-end training, often struggle to handle the diverse data dependencies of multiple traffic flow patterns. Additionally, traffic flow variations are highly sensitive to temporal information changes. Regrettably, other researchers have not sufficiently recognized the importance of temporal information.To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called A Time-Enhanced Data Disentanglement Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting (TEDDN). This network disentangles the originally complex and intertwined traffic data into stable patterns and trends. By flexibly learning temporal and node information through a dynamic graph enhanced by a temporal feature extraction module, TEDDN demonstrates significant efficacy in disentangling and extracting complex traffic information. Experimental evaluations and ablation studies on four real-world datasets validate the superiority of our method.
A Pretrained Probabilistic Transformer for City-Scale Traffic Volume Prediction
Shen, Shiyu, Pan, Bin, Xue, Guirong
City-scale traffic volume prediction plays a pivotal role in intelligent transportation systems, yet remains a challenge due to the inherent incompleteness and bias in observational data. Although deep learning-based methods have shown considerable promise, most existing approaches produce deterministic point estimates, thereby neglecting the uncertainty arising from unobserved traffic flows. Furthermore, current models are typically trained in a city-specific manner, which hinders their generalizability and limits scalability across diverse urban contexts. To overcome these limitations, we introduce TrafficPPT, a Pretrained Probabilistic Transformer designed to model traffic volume as a distributional aggregation of trajectories. Our framework fuses heterogeneous data sources-including real-time observations, historical trajectory data, and road network topology-enabling robust and uncertainty-aware traffic inference. TrafficPPT is initially pretrained on large-scale simulated data spanning multiple urban scenarios, and later fine-tuned on target cities to ensure effective domain adaptation. Experiments on real-world datasets show that TrafficPPT consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, particularly under conditions of extreme data sparsity. Code will be open.
Lightweight Spatio-Temporal Attention Network with Graph Embedding and Rotational Position Encoding for Traffic Forecasting
Traffic forecasting is a key task in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Recent research on traffic forecasting has mainly focused on combining graph neural networks (GNNs) with other models. However, GNNs only consider short-range spatial information. In this study, we present a novel model termed LSTAN-GERPE (Lightweight Spatio-Temporal Attention Network with Graph Embedding and Rotational Position Encoding). This model leverages both Temporal and Spatial Attention mechanisms to effectively capture long-range traffic dynamics. Additionally, the optimal frequency for rotational position encoding is determined through a grid search approach in both the spatial and temporal attention mechanisms. This systematic optimization enables the model to effectively capture complex traffic patterns. The model also enhances feature representation by incorporating geographical location maps into the spatio-temporal embeddings. Without extensive feature engineering, the proposed method in this paper achieves advanced accuracy on the real-world traffic forecasting datasets PeMS04 and PeMS08.