UniST-Pred: A Robust Unified Framework for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Forecasting in Transportation Networks Under Disruptions

Traffic prediction is difficult due to the complex interplay of temporal evolution, spatial interactions, and delayed spatio-temporal propagation over road networks. Existing methods either model spatial and temporal dependencies separately or employ unified spatio-temporal structures, but they often insufficiently characterize how neighboring sensors at historical timestamps influence a target node, while complex joint models may incur high computation. This paper proposes STEI-PCN, an efficient pure convolutional network based on spatio-temporal encoding and relation inference. It first builds a local causal joint spatio-temporal graph to restrict candidate interactions, then uses absolute position and relative distance encodings to infer dynamic edge weights. A single-layer graph convolution with a position-aware gated activation unit captures local joint dependencies, and temporal dilated causal convolutions complement long-range temporal patterns. A multi-view prediction module fuses raw, local propagation, and long-range temporal representations for direct multi-step forecasting. Experiments on PeMS03, PeMS04, PeMS07, PeMS08, and PeMS-Bay under multiple horizons show that STEI-PCN achieves competitive accuracy with moderate parameters and low training and inference costs. Ablation and fluctuation analyses further verify the contributions of the main components and empirically analyze the effects of the training-stage constraints under sharp speed changes. Our code is available at a GitHub link https://github.com/Jessez2/STEI-PCN.

Accurate traffic forecasting is crucial for intelligent transportation systems, supporting effective traffic management, congestion reduction, and informed urban planning. However, traditional models often fail to adequately capture the intricate spatio-temporal dependencies present in traffic data. To overcome these limitations, we introduce GAMMA-Net, a novel approach that integrates Graph Attention Networks (GAT) with multi-axis Selective State Space Models (Mamba). The GAT component uses a self-attention mechanism to dynamically adjust the influence of nodes within the traffic network, enabling adaptive spatial dependency modeling based on real-time conditions. Simultaneously, the Mamba module efficiently models long-term temporal and spatial dynamics without the heavy computational cost of conventional recurrent architectures. Extensive experiments on several benchmark traffic datasets, including METR-LA, PEMS-BAY, PEMS03, PEMS04, PEMS07, and PEMS08, show that GAMMA-Net consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across different prediction horizons, achieving up to a 16.25% reduction in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) compared to baseline models. Ablation studies highlight the critical contributions of both the spatial and temporal components, emphasizing their complementary role in improving prediction accuracy. In conclusion, the GAMMA-Net model sets a new standard in traffic forecasting, offering a powerful tool for next-generation traffic management and urban planning. The code for this study is available at https://github.com/hdy6438/GAMMA-Net

Traffic forecasting is a challenging spatio-temporal modeling task and a critical component of urban transportation management. Current studies mainly focus on deterministic predictions, with limited considerations on the uncertainty and stochasticity in traffic dynamics. Therefore, this paper proposes an elegant yet universal approach that transforms existing models into probabilistic predictors by replacing only the final output layer with a novel Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) layer. The modified model requires no changes to the training pipeline and can be trained using only the Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) loss, without any auxiliary or regularization terms. Experiments on multiple traffic datasets show that our approach generalizes from classic to modern model architectures while preserving deterministic performance. Furthermore, we propose a systematic evaluation procedure based on cumulative distributions and confidence intervals, and demonstrate that our approach is considerably more accurate and informative than unimodal or deterministic baselines. Finally, a more detailed study on a real-world dense urban traffic network is presented to examine the impact of data quality on uncertainty quantification and to show the robustness of our approach under imperfect data conditions. Code available at https://github.com/Weijiang-Xiong/OpenSkyTraffic