Origin-destination (OD) flow forecasting supports urban mobility decisions by predicting the volume and patterns of human movement across a city. Most existing public OD benchmarks provide only a partial view of citywide mobility, covering a single transport service or at most two modes. With partial mode coverage, observed demand changes are difficult to separate into shifts across transport modes and changes in total travel. We introduce SeoulMMOD, a large-scale public benchmark for citywide multimodal mobility in Seoul. SeoulMMOD provides three years of hourly OD flows estimating total mobility for 6 urban travel modes across 25 districts and 426 sub-districts, together with travel-time, travel-distance, calendar, rainfall, and point-of-interest (POI) signals. Using SeoulMMOD, we benchmark 14 forecasting baselines under a common protocol and analyse the effects of spatial scaling, joint versus mode-separate training, and cross-year generalization. Results show that several spatio-temporal models that work at district level do not scale to sub-district OD forecasting, and that naive joint multi-mode training does not consistently improve accuracy. Together, the dataset and benchmark establish a reproducible testbed for multi-mode, multi-year OD forecasting at the city scale.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Annual OD outflow in SeoulMMOD (2024) from the same Seoul origin at district and sub-district levels. Arc color indicates the destination’s dominant transport mode.
Dataset
Coverage
Modes
# Nodes
# OD pairs
Trip attrs
Context
Public
Zone-level forecasting
Liang et al. [ 11 ]
2018-03 – 2018-08
subway, ride-hailing
136 + 63
—
×
×
×
Ke et al. [ 9 ]
2018-01 – 2018-12
solo ride-hailing, shared ride-hailing
63
—
×
×
×
Yao et al. [ 32 ]
2015-01 – 2015-03 / 2016-07 – 2016-08
bike, taxi
200
—
×
×
✓
OD-level forecasting
Zhang et al. [ 34 ] (BJ)
2016-02 – 2016-04
subway, bus
276 + 2,320
28,802
×
×
×
Table 1: Related dataset comparison. Trip attrs lists per-record auxiliary attributes (average travel time / distance). Context lists bundled signals (holiday, point-of-interest, weather). “+” denotes separate node sets for different modes.
Figure 2: Aggregate and temporal characteristics of SeoulMMOD . (a) Distribution of OD-record flow. (b) Morning-rush net inflow, computed as inflow minus outflow during 07:00–09:00. (c) Hourly profile by day type. (d) Monthly trend across years.
Figure 3: Multi-mode structural diversity. (a) Mode composition over the day. (b) Pairwise Pearson correlation of hourly total flow between modes. (c, d) Disparity-filtered backbone networks and Louvain communities for car and walk, with edge opacity and width proportional to flow. Additional distributional and community-similarity views are shown in Appendix A .
Figure 4: Trip attributes and contextual information in SeoulMMOD . (a) District-level travel distance and travel time, with marker size showing average hourly outflow. (b) Per-mode hourly flow change under rainfall categories, relative to dry hours. (c) Hourly inflow for office and leisure destination examples on weekdays and holidays. (d) Weekday net-inflow ratio for selected office, education, and low-POI residential examples.
6h → 6h
12h → 12h
24h → 24h
Cost (24h)
Model
MAE
RMSE
wMAPE
MAE
RMSE
wMAPE
MAE
RMSE
wMAPE
#Params
BS
Train/ep
Total
District scale (625 OD pairs)
HA
22.9
112.2
10.5%
22.9
112.2
10.5%
22.8
111.8
10.5%
—
—
—
—
LV
106.6
566.8
49.0%
144.2
692.3
66.3%
139.0
678.8
63.9%
—
—
—
—
STAEformer
21.8
93.7
10.1%
22.8
100.1
10.5%
21.4
92.9
9.8%
2.8M
8
83s
2.3h
STID
23.4
99.7
10.8%
25.1
106.9
11.5%
24.6
111.7
11.3%
143K
16
3.2s
0.09h
Table 2: Multi-horizon performance and computational cost, aggregated across modes. Bold marks the best and underline marks the second-best per (horizon, metric) within each level. Cost columns report parameter count, batch size, per-epoch wall-clock, and 100-epoch wall-clock estimates at the 24h → 24h horizon.
metro bus
local bus
subway
walk
car
other
Avg
Model
MAE
RMSE
MAE
RMSE
MAE
RMSE
MAE
RMSE
MAE
RMSE
MAE
RMSE
MAE
RMSE
HA
2.00
7.85
18.7
72.4
32.2
73.2
35.2
233.4
30.5
74.7
18.1
64.9
22.8
111.8
LV
6.11
34.3
104.9
417.8
231.1
466.1
232.1
1429.7
160.0
436.3
99.8
371.0
139.0
678.8
STAEformer
2.30
11.2
16.5
55.4
33.0
72.0
28.3
188.9
31.1
69.4
17.0
54.3
21.4
92.9
STID
2.94
13.9
19.4
65.2
37.4
82.7
33.1
231.7
35.3
78.9
19.6
60.9
24.6
111.7
AGCRN
2.83
13.1
21.7
79.0
45.0
103.9
53.0
401.8
38.0
89.0
21.7
73.4
30.4
178.9
Table 3: Per-mode MAE and RMSE at the 24h → 24h horizon, district level. Bold marks the best and underline marks the second-best per (mode, metric).
STID
AGCRN
STAEformer
MTGNN
Mode
Joint
Sep
Δ
Joint
Sep
Δ
Joint
Sep
Δ
Joint
Sep
Δ
metro_bus
2.94
1.79
−39.0%
2.83
2.05
−27.8%
2.30
1.81
−21.0%
3.00
1.86
−38.1%
local_bus
19.36
15.85
−18.1%
21.71
18.74
−13.7%
16.51
16.01
−3.0%
20.80
17.52
−15.7%
subway
37.43
30.98
−17.2%
44.98
41.17
−8.5%
32.95
29.37
−10.9%
44.56
34.14
−23.4%
walk
33.14
27.77
−16.2%
53.02
43.50
−18.0%
28.33
29.80
+5.2%
37.87
35.50
−6.3%
car
35.32
29.38
−16.8%
37.96
32.27
−15.0%
31.12
27.90
−10.3%
37.13
31.85
−14.2%
Table 4: Joint training vs one model per mode for four spatio-temporal models at the district 24h horizon. Bold marks the lower MAE per (model, mode). Δ is (Sep−Joint)/Joint .
Model
2024 test
2025 overall
Spring
Summer
Fall
Winter
Δ
STAEformer
21.37
25.83
28.29
23.70
25.75
25.56
+20.89%
AGCRN
30.37
35.77
37.33
32.84
36.93
36.00
+17.78%
GWNet
27.55
33.47
35.21
30.60
33.84
34.29
+21.49%
MTGNN
27.40
32.35
34.63
29.95
31.93
32.89
+18.07%
iTransformer
25.33
28.08
29.87
26.65
28.35
27.42
+10.86%
Table 5: Cross-year generalization at the district 24h horizon (train 2024, test 2025), broken down by season. Bold marks the easiest season per model. Δ% is the in-year vs cross-year MAE change.
Appendix figures & tables7 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 5: Additional descriptive views of multi-mode OD structure. (a) Complementary cumulative distribution of OD-pair flows per mode. (b) Distribution of OD-record flow by mode. (c) Distribution of average OD-record distance by mode. (d) Normalised mutual information between per-mode community assignments.
Day type
n days
Trips/day
metro bus
local bus
subway
walk
car
other
Weekday
246
20.64 M
0.61
12.48
21.73
33.06
20.66
11.45
Weekend
101
16.87 M
0.59
12.80
17.63
35.06
22.80
11.12
Holiday
19
14.71 M
0.59
12.58
16.24
36.35
23.61
10.63
Change vs weekday (pp)
metro bus
local bus
subway
walk
car
other
Weekend
—
− 18%
− 0.02
+ 0.32
− 4.10
+ 1.99
+ 2.14
− 0.33
Holiday
—
− 29%
− 0.02
+ 0.10
− 5.50
+ 3.29
+ 2.95
− 0.82
Appendix
Table 6: Mode share (%) and total daily trip volume by day type for 2024 at the district scale. Holiday counts Korean public holidays. Weekend excludes days flagged as holidays. Mode shares sum to 100% per row.
Condition
n cells
Share
metro bus
local bus
subway
walk
car
other
Dry (0 mm)
206,895
94.21%
0.60
12.55
20.49
33.74
21.30
11.33
Trace ( < 0.5 mm)
3,012
1.37%
0.67
12.38
21.22
32.44
21.75
11.54
Light (0.5–2 mm)
5,741
2.61%
0.63
12.74
21.09
33.13
20.98
11.43
Moderate (2–10 mm)
3,283
1.49%
0.62
13.04
20.88
32.43
21.44
11.58
Heavy ( > 10 mm)
669
0.30%
0.62
13.42
22.42
30.60
21.06
11.87
Appendix
Table 7: Origin district-hour mode share (%) by rainfall intensity, district scale, 2024. Mode shares sum to 100% per row.
Group
Categories
Transport infrastructure
airport, rail station, bus terminal, subway station, bus stop
Commerce and leisure
attraction, bank, department store, supermarket, theater, hotel
Public and health services
government office, general hospital, clinic, pharmacy
Education
kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, university
Appendix
Table 8: POI count features grouped into four broad groups for presentation.
POI
Mode
r (count)
rs
r (density)
r (partial ∣ area)
Subway station
subway
+ 0.458
+ 0.442
+ 0.438
+ 0.475
Bank
subway
+ 0.356
+ 0.314
+ 0.430
+ 0.369
Theater
subway
+ 0.345
+ 0.298
+ 0.332
+ 0.347
Subway station
local bus
− 0.284
− 0.324
− 0.256
− 0.286
Bus stop
local bus
+ 0.276
+ 0.324
+ 0.318
+ 0.338
Kindergarten
subway
− 0.283
− 0.307
− 0.257
− 0.283
Appendix
Table 9: Correlation between per-sub-district POI count and destination mode share. We report four correlation variants per (POI, mode) pair — Pearson r on counts, Spearman rs , Pearson r on per-km 2 density, and partial r controlling for sub-district area. Rows have raw ∣r∣≥0.20 and BH-adjusted q<0.001 .
Variant
MAE @ 6
MAE @ 12
MAE @ 24
Δ @ 6
Δ @ 12
Δ @ 24
STID base
23.41
25.07
24.63
—
—
—
+ Holiday
23.81
25.55
23.24
+ 0.40
+ 0.48
− 1.39
+ POI
22.97
25.35
24.14
− 0.44
+ 0.28
− 0.49
+ Rainfall
24.75
24.37
24.14
+ 1.34
− 0.70
− 0.49
Appendix
Table 10: Test MAE on the 2024 district-scale dataset when STID is extended with each contextual signal in isolation. Lower is better, bold marks the best per horizon, and Δ is the change against STID base .
Figure 6: Error stratification by destination-district POI count. (a) Districts with more POIs have larger target volume. (b) Absolute MAE increases with POI count for HA and STAEformer. (c) Relative error decreases with POI count, indicating that high-volume districts can have larger absolute errors but smaller percentage errors. Pearson correlations are shown in each panel.
Urban transportation systems consist of multiple mobility modes that coexist within the same city and exhibit complex interdependencies, leading to correlated demand dynamics across modes. However, forecasting demand jointly across different modes remains challenging due to substantial heterogeneity in space and the limited availability of historical data for emerging modes. Existing forecasting methods are largely developed for individual mobility modes and implicitly assume compatible spatial structures between source and target systems, which severely restricts their applicability in multi-modal settings. To address these challenges, we propose TransMod, a unified framework for urban mobility demand forecasting that enables effective knowledge transfer across heterogeneous mobility modes. TransMod constructs a shared zone-level spatial representation that aligns mobility systems with different spatial granularities into a common space, thereby reducing structural mismatch and distributional shift. Built on this unified representation, TransMod further learns transferable spatio-temporal patterns from data-rich source modes and adapts them to data-scarce target modes, alleviating the dependence on extensive target-domain histories. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TransMod consistently outperforms existing approaches and provides robust forecasting performance under limited target data.
Yixuan Zhao, Man Luo
University of Exeter Department of Computer Science Exeter, United Kingdom
Origin-destination (OD) flow modeling underpins urban planning and mobility analysis, but prevailing graph-based methods often neglect salient geographic attributes, limiting their ability to model long-range and multi-area dependencies. In this paper, we introduce GeoFlow, a novel framework that (i) augments area representations with geospatial attributes, including relative positions, k-hop and geodesic distances, (ii) employs a specialized geometric-intrinsic fusion encoder design that combines graph attention for intrinsic area signals with coordinate-aware encoders for global structure, and (iii) adopts an axial-global attention decoder to capture OD-specific competitive dependencies. For OD flow generation, GeoFlow is paired with flow matching models to produce more authentic and diverse mobility samples. Empirically, GeoFlow achieves superior performance in predictive accuracy, while substantially improving generative fidelity and diversity. Ablation and analytical studies confirm the contribution of each component. Code is available at https://github.com/ZheruiHuang/GeoFlow.
Zherui Huang, Guanjie Zheng, Hao Xue +1
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · The University of New South Wales, Sydney
Dynamic origin-destination (OD) flow generation seeks to synthesize realistic mobility dynamics from temporal context alone, without relying on historical OD observations. A key challenge is to translate semantic temporal signals into temporally coherent OD patterns while preserving the inherent spatial heterogeneity of urban regions. We propose DynaOD, a semantic-driven framework that models temporal dynamics through two complementary perspectives: discrete directional trends that characterize qualitative shifts in urban activity patterns, and continuous temporal evolution that captures how such shifts unfold over time. By jointly encoding these temporal semantics, the framework constructs time-varying region representations that condition pretrained static OD generators in a lightweight and plug-and-play fashion. This modular design further supports scalable deployment and cross-city transferability. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show that our method consistently outperforms representative baselines in both predictive accuracy and distributional fidelity. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/csjiezhao/DynaOD.
Jie Zhao, Xianqi Dai, Jie Feng +2
Department of Electronic Engineering, BNRist, Tsinghua University · Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School · Zhongguancun Academy