Traffic Forecasting

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Traffic forecasting estimates how movement and demand will change across road networks, transit systems, airspace, and communications networks, supporting planning, routing, and resource allocation. Common approaches combine graph neural networks, temporal convolutions, attention-based Transformers, and newer state-space models; other work uses signal decomposition, physical or agent-based simulation, and contextual data such as incidents, weather, or mobility patterns. Researchers are extending these models with probabilistic predictions, foundation models, and online, continual, or federated adaptation to handle uncertainty, privacy, and changing conditions. A central challenge is making forecasts accurate and efficient while ensuring they transfer across places, sensor configurations, and traffic regimes—and that improvements in forecast metrics actually help downstream decisions.

Latest papers

87 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, down 20% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

May 9, 2026

TSNN: A Non-parametric and Interpretable Framework for Traffic Time Series Forecasting

Although many complex models were proposed to analyze time series data, some studies have demonstrated remarkable performance with simpler structures. A recent study proposed a non-parametric framework for 3D point cloud classification, which has the potential to be adapted for time series forecasting and enable interpretability. Inspired by the previous works, we present TSNN, a non-parametric and interpretable framework for traffic time series forecasting. TSNN consists of multiple layers that decouple the time series by matching the entries in a memory bank, where the memory bank is constructed using a similar matching process within the training set. It leverages the periodicity in traffic data to enhance forecasting accuracy while maintaining a simple model architecture. The proposed model operates without trainable parameters, preserving its inherent interpretability. In the experiments, TSNN achieves competitive performance compared to the typical deep learning models in four real-world traffic flow datasets. We also visualize the decoupling process to show the effectiveness of the components. Finally, we demonstrate the interpretability of the model and illustrate the contribution of each time step within the memory bank.

Bowen Liu, Haijian Lai, Chan-Tong Lam +4

Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao SAR, China

Time Series Forecasting Traffic Forecasting

May 8, 2026

Efficient Prompt Learning for Traffic Forecasting

Accurate traffic prediction is essential for optimizing transportation systems, enhancing resource allocation, and improving overall urban administration. Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance and have been widely used in various spatio-temporal prediction scenarios. However, these prediction methods often exhibit low generalization ability, struggling with distribution shifts caused by spatio-temporal dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose an approach to enhance the generalization and adaptation of spatio-temporal GNNs through efficient prompting. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight and model-agnostic prompt tuning framework for spatio-temporal GNNs, named SimpleST. It facilitates adapting pre-trained spatio-temporal GNNs to novel distributions while keeping the model parameters fixed. This prompt mechanism reduces the overhead and complexity of adaptation, enabling efficient utilization of pre-trained models for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments conducted on five real-world urban spatio-temporal datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of prediction accuracy and computational efficiency.

Qianru Zhang, Xinyi Gao, Alexander Zhou +3

School of Computing and Data Science The University of Hong Kong · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The University of Queensland · Department of Computing The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

OOD Generalization Prompt Tuning Spatiotemporal Forecasting Traffic Forecasting Spatiotemporal GNNs

May 7, 2026

Generalising Travel Time Prediction To Varying Route Choices In Urban Networks

Previous methods that predict system-wide travel time, predominantly grounded in graph neural networks, remain limited to typical and recurring demand patterns. While they successfully predict future congestion following daily commute, they inherently approximate a single demand realisation and fail to capture varying route choices. In this work, we propose a Generalised Travel Time Predictor (GenTTP) that successfully differentiates route choices and offers accurate flow and travel time predictions. Our framework learns to uncover complex spatiotemporal traffic patterns and microscopic relationships between route choices and the resulting travel times. This addresses a critical gap: the lack of travel time prediction models that generalise across varying route assignments, where the same demand can produce substantially different network-wide outcomes depending on how travellers are distributed over available paths.

Łukasz Gorczyca, Kacper Drozd, Michał Bujak +1

Jagiellonian University Doctoral School of Exact and Natural Sciences · Jagiellonian University

Intelligent Transportation Systems Traffic Flow Estimation Traffic Forecasting

May 5, 2026

Road Risk Monitor: A Deployable U.S. Road Incident Forecasting System with Live Weather and Road-Level Tiles

Nationwide road-incident forecasting is a systems problem before it is a modeling problem. A usable service must connect historical incident archives, historicalandliveweather,nationalroadgeometry, offline model training, tile generation, web serving and runtime handoff. This paper presents Road Risk Monitor, a U.S.-wide road-safety stack that combines a nationwide H3 baseline trained on FARS fatal-crash data with a road-segment forecasting pipeline trained from TIGER/Line geometry and US-Accidents events, then serves predictions through live APIs, raster tiles, JSON road tiles, and a public web application.

Anton Ivchenko

Intelligent Transportation Systems Traffic Accident Anticipation Spatiotemporal Forecasting Traffic Forecasting

May 5, 2026

Local Truncation Error-Guided Neural ODEs for Large Scale Traffic Forecasting

Spatiotemporal forecasting in physical systems, such as large-scale traffic networks, requires modeling a dual dynamic: continuous macroscopic rhythms and discrete, unpredictable microscopic shocks. While Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) excel at capturing smooth evolution, their inherent Lipschitz continuity constraints inevitably cause severe over-smoothing when confronting abrupt anomalies. Recent physics-informed methods attempt to bypass this by penalizing numerical integration errors to enforce manifold smoothness. However, we mathematically reveal that such rigid regularization inherently triggers gradient conflicts and ``attention collapse,'' stripping the model of its sensitivity to anomalies. To resolve this continuity-shock dilemma, we propose Local Truncation Error-Guided Neural ODEs (LTE-ODE). Rather than treating numerical error as a nuisance to be eliminated, we innovatively repurpose the Local Truncation Error (LTE) as an unsupervised forward inductive bias. By mapping the LTE into a dynamic spatial attention mask, our architecture gracefully preserves high-precision continuous ODE evolution in stable regions, while adaptively triggering a discrete compensation branch exclusively at shock points. Trained purely end-to-end without manifold penalties, LTE-ODE achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple large-scale benchmarks, exhibiting exceptional robustness against highly non-linear fluctuations. Furthermore, our ablation on integration steps demonstrates high deployment flexibility, allowing the model to seamlessly adapt to varying hardware memory constraints in real-world applications.

Xiao Zhang, Yafei Li, Ruixiang Wang +3

Zhengzhou University · Northwestern Polytechnical University

Spatiotemporal Forecasting Neural ODEs Traffic Forecasting

May 2, 2026

CNN-based Multi-In-Multi-Out Model for Efficient Spatiotemporal Prediction

Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) or Transformer architecture based models have been proposed to overcome the limitations of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based models in spatiotemporal prediction. These models prevent the inefficiency of parallelization limitation due to the sequential properties and stacked error due to the recursive method, and show high performance. Novertheless, there are still some challengies. First, CNN based models have difficulty considering global information due to the local properties of the kernel, and their performance is limited. In addition, information is mixed because the time axis is combined with the channel axis of the image for processing. Models based on Transformer architecture have high complexity due to the self-attention calcuation and take a long training time. In this paper, we propose a new structure model called CNN-based Multi-In-Multi-Out model for Efficient Spatiotemporal Prediction (MIMO-ESP) to overcome these limitations. MIMO-ESP considers global information and significantly improves complexity by configuring a Transformer architecture based on CNN. In addition, it treats the time axis as an independent axis without combining it, and effectively considers spatiotemporal information together by applying dilation. This structure makes MIMO-ESP efficient and high performance. Extensive experiment results on three promising benchmark datasets which including video, traffic, and precipitation prediction tasks demonstrate that the usefulness of MIMO-ESP due to the achieved competitive efficiency while outperforming existing models. Furthermore, the ablation study results demonstrate the usefulness of the components of MIMO-ESP, emphasizing the potential of the proposed approaches.

Hyeonseok Jin

Department of Artificial Intelligence Convergence, Graduate School, Chonnam National University

Efficient Neural Network Inference Precipitation Forecasting Hybrid CNN-Transformer Architectures Video Prediction Spatiotemporal Forecasting Traffic Forecasting

Apr 22, 2026

Forecasting Individual NetFlows using a Predictive Masked Graph Autoencoder

In this paper, we propose a proof-of-concept Graph Neural Network model that can successfully predict network flow-level traffic (NetFlow) by accurately modelling the graph structure and the connection features. We use sliding-windows to split the network traffic in equal-sized heterogeneous bidirectional graphs containing IP, Port, and Connection nodes. We then use the GNN to model the evolution of the graph structure and the connection features. Our approach shows superior results when identifying the Port and IP to which connections attach, while feature reconstruction remains competitive with strong forecasting baselines. Overall, our work showcases the use of GNNs for per-flow NetFlow prediction.

Georgios Anyfantis, Pere Barlet-Ros

Department of Computer Architecture Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya Barcelona, Spain

Temporal GNNs Traffic Forecasting

Apr 18, 2026

GAMMA-Net: Adaptive Long-Horizon Traffic Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Model based on Interleaved Graph Attention and Multi-Axis Mamba

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

Dongyi He, Yuanquan Gao, Bin Jiang +1

School of Artificial Intelligence, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing, 400054, China

Long-Term Time Series Forecasting Intelligent Transportation Systems Traffic Forecasting Spatiotemporal GNNs

Apr 17, 2026

FedLLM: A Privacy-Preserving Federated Large Language Model for Explainable Traffic Flow Prediction

Traffic prediction plays a central role in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) by supporting real-time decision-making, congestion management, and long-term planning. However, many existing approaches face practical limitations. Most spatio-temporal models are trained on centralized data, rely on numerical representations, and offer limited explainability. Recent Large Language Model (LLM) methods improve reasoning capabilities but typically assume centralized data availability and do not fully capture the distributed and heterogeneous nature of real-world traffic systems. To address these challenges, this study proposes FedLLM (Federated LLM), a privacy-preserving and distributed framework for explainable multi-horizon short-term traffic flow prediction (15-60 minutes). The framework introduces four key contributions: 1) a Composite Selection Score (CSS) for data-driven freeway selection that captures structural diversity across traffic regions 2) a domain-adapted LLM fine-tuned on structured traffic prompts encoding spatial, temporal, and statistical context 3) FedLLM framework, that enables collaborative training across heterogeneous clients while exchanging only lightweight LoRA adapter parameters, 4) a structured prompt representation that supports contextual reasoning and cross-region generalization. The FedLLM design allows each client to learn from local traffic patterns while contributing to a shared global model through efficient parameter exchange, reducing communication overhead and keeping data private. This setup supports learning under non-IID traffic distributions. Experimental results show that FedLLM achieves improved predictive performance over centralized baselines, while producing structured and explainable outputs. These findings highlight the potential of combining FL with domain-adapted LLMs for scalable, privacy-aware, and explainable traffic prediction.

Seerat Kaur, Sukhjit Singh Sehra, Dariush Ebrahimi

Department of Physics & Computer Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

Privacy-Preserving Language Models Traffic Flow Estimation LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting Traffic Forecasting Federated Learning

Apr 17, 2026

Unveiling Stochasticity: Universal Multi-modal Probabilistic Modeling for Traffic Forecasting

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

Weijiang Xiong, Robert Fonod, Nikolas Geroliminis

Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS), EPFL, Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland

Traffic Forecasting Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Apr 15, 2026

FAST: A Synergistic Framework of Attention and State-space Models for Spatiotemporal Traffic Prediction

Traffic forecasting requires modeling complex temporal dynamics and long-range spatial dependencies over large sensor networks. Existing methods typically face a trade-off between expressiveness and efficiency: Transformer-based models capture global dependencies well but suffer from quadratic complexity, while recent selective state-space models are computationally efficient yet less effective at modeling spatial interactions in graph-structured traffic data. We propose FAST, a unified framework that combines attention and state-space modeling for scalable spatiotemporal traffic forecasting. FAST adopts a Temporal-Spatial-Temporal architecture, where temporal attention modules capture both short- and long-term temporal patterns, and a Mamba-based spatial module models long-range inter-sensor dependencies with linear complexity. To better represent heterogeneous traffic contexts, FAST further introduces a learnable multi-source spatiotemporal embedding that integrates historical traffic flow, temporal context, and node-level information, together with a multi-level skip prediction mechanism for hierarchical feature fusion. Experiments on PeMS04, PeMS07, and PeMS08 show that FAST consistently outperforms strong baselines from Transformer-, GNN-, attention-, and Mamba-based families. In particular, FAST achieves the best MAE and RMSE on all three benchmarks, with up to 4.3% lower RMSE and 2.8% lower MAE than the strongest baseline, demonstrating a favorable balance between accuracy, scalability, and generalization.

Xinjin Li, Jinghan Cao, Mengyue Wang +5

Columbia University New York, NY, USA · San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA, USA · University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA, USA +5

Spatiotemporal Forecasting Traffic Forecasting

Mar 27, 2026

Interpretable long-term traffic modelling on national road networks using theory-informed deep learning

Long-term traffic modelling is fundamental to transport planning, but existing approaches often trade off interpretability, transferability, and predictive accuracy. Classical travel demand models provide behavioural structure but rely on strong assumptions and extensive calibration, whereas generic deep learning models capture complex patterns but often lack theoretical grounding and spatial transferability, limiting their usefulness for long-term planning applications. We propose DeepDemand, a theory-informed deep learning framework that embeds key components of travel demand theory to predict long-term highway traffic volumes using external socioeconomic features and road-network structure. The framework integrates a competitive two-source Dijkstra procedure for local origin-destination (OD) region extraction and OD pair screening with a differentiable architecture modelling OD interactions and travel-time deterrence. The model is evaluated using eight years (2017-2024) of observations on the UK strategic road network, covering 5088 highway segments. Under random cross-validation, DeepDemand achieves an R2 of 0.718 and an MAE of 7406 vehicles, outperforming linear, ridge, random forest, and gravity-style baselines. Performance remains strong under spatial cross-validation (R2 = 0.665), indicating good geographic transferability. Interpretability analysis reveals a stable nonlinear travel-time deterrence pattern, key socioeconomic drivers of demand, and polycentric OD interaction structures aligned with major employment centres and transport hubs. These results highlight the value of integrating transport theory with deep learning for interpretable highway traffic modelling and practical planning applications.

Yue Li, Shujuan Chen, Akihiro Shimoda +1

Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge, 1–5 Scroope Terrace, Cambridge, CB2 1PX, United Kingdom · Independent Researcher, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Traffic Forecasting Traffic Flow Estimation

Mar 26, 2026

Ultra-fast Traffic Nowcasting and Control via Differentiable Agent-based Simulation

Traffic digital twins, which inform policymakers of effective interventions based on large-scale, high-fidelity computational models calibrated to real-world traffic, hold promise for addressing societal challenges in our rapidly urbanizing world. However, conventional fine-grained traffic simulations are non-differentiable and typically rely on inefficient gradient-free optimization, making calibration for real-world applications computationally infeasible. Here we present a differentiable agent-based traffic simulator that enables ultra-fast model calibration, traffic nowcasting, and control on large-scale networks. We develop several differentiable computing techniques for simulating individual vehicle movements, including stochastic decision-making and inter-agent interactions, while ensuring that entire simulation trajectories remain end-to-end differentiable for efficient gradient-based optimization. On the large-scale Chicago road network, with over 10,000 calibration parameters, our model simulates more than one million vehicles at 173 times real-time speed. This ultra-fast simulation, together with efficient gradient-based optimization, enables us to complete model calibration using the previous 30 minutes of traffic data in 455 s, provide a one-hour-ahead traffic nowcast in 21 s, and solve the resulting traffic control problem in 728 s. This yields a full calibration--nowcast--control loop in under 20 minutes, leaving about 40 minutes of lead time for implementing interventions. Our work thus provides a practical computational basis for realizing traffic digital twins.

Fumiyasu Makinoshima, Yuya Yamaguchi, Eigo Segawa +2

Fujitsu Limited, Kawasaki, Japan · Fujitsu Research of America, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA +1

Intelligent Transportation Systems Agent-Based Modeling Digital Twins Traffic Forecasting Model Calibration Differentiable Physics

Mar 17, 2026

Long-Horizon Traffic Forecasting via Incident-Aware Conformal Spatio-Temporal Transformers

Reliable multi-horizon traffic forecasting is challenging because network conditions are stochastic, incident disruptions are intermittent, and effective spatial dependencies vary across time-of-day patterns. This study is conducted on the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) traffic count data and corresponding ODOT crash records. This work utilizes a Spatio-Temporal Transformer (STT) model with Adaptive Conformal Prediction (ACP) to produce multi-horizon forecasts with calibrated uncertainty. We propose a piecewise Coefficient of Variation (CV) strategy that models hour-to-hour traveltime variability using a log-normal distribution, enabling the construction of a per-hour dynamic adjacency matrix. We further perturb edge weights using incident-related severity signals derived from the ODOT crash dataset that comprises incident clearance time, weather conditions, speed violations, work zones, and roadway functional class, to capture localized disruptions and peak/off-peak transitions. This dynamic graph construction replaces a fixed-CV assumption and better represents changing traffic conditions within the forecast window. For validation, we generate extended trips via multi-hour loop runs on the Columbus, Ohio, network in SUMO simulations and apply a Monte Carlo simulation to obtain travel-time distributions for a Vehicle Under Test (VUT). Experiments demonstrate improved long-horizon accuracy and well-calibrated prediction intervals compared to other baseline methods.

Mayur Patil, Qadeer Ahmed, Shawn Midlam-Mohler +4

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Center for Automotive Research, The Ohio State University · Ohio Department of Transportation · Honda Research Institute USA, Inc.

Spatiotemporal Transformers Traffic Forecasting Transformer

Mar 12, 2026

Spatial PDE-aware Selective State-space with Nested Memory for Mobile Traffic Grid Forecasting

Traffic forecasting in cellular networks is a challenging spatiotemporal prediction problem due to strong temporal dependencies, spatial heterogeneity across cells, and the need for scalability to large network deployments. Traditional cell-specific models incur prohibitive training and maintenance costs, while global models often fail to capture heterogeneous spatial dynamics. Recent spatiotemporal architectures based on attention or graph neural networks improve accuracy but introduce high computational overhead, limiting their applicability in large-scale or real-time settings. We study spatiotemporal grid forecasting, where each time step is a 2D lattice of traffic values, and predict the next grid patch using previous patches. We propose NeST-S6, a convolutional selective state-space model (SSM) with a spatial PDE-aware core, implemented in a nested learning paradigm: convolutional local spatial mixing feeds a spatial PDE-aware SSM core, while a nested-learning long-term memory is updated by a learned optimizer when one-step prediction errors indicate unmodeled dynamics. On the mobile-traffic grid (Milan dataset) at three resolutions (202, 502, 1002), NeST-S6 attains lower errors than a strong Mamba-family baseline in both single-step and 6-step autoregressive rollouts. Under drift stress tests, our model's nested memory lowers MAE by 48-65% over a no-memory ablation. NeST-S6 also speeds full-grid reconstruction by 32 times and reduces MACs by 4.3 times compared to competitive per-pixel scanning models, while achieving 61% lower per-pixel RMSE.

Zineddine Bettouche, Khalid Ali, Andreas Fischer +1

Deggendorf Institute of Technology, Dieter-Görlitz-Platz 1, 94469 Deggendorf

Spatiotemporal Forecasting Traffic Forecasting Selective SSMs

Mar 12, 2026

VisiFold: Long-Term Traffic Forecasting via Temporal Folding Graph and Node Visibility

Traffic forecasting is a cornerstone of intelligent transportation systems. While existing research has made significant progress in short-term prediction, long-term forecasting remains a largely uncharted and challenging frontier. Extending the prediction horizon intensifies two critical issues: escalating computational resource consumption and increasingly complex spatial-temporal dependencies. Current approaches, which rely on spatial-temporal graphs and process temporal and spatial dimensions separately, suffer from snapshot-stacking inflation and cross-step fragmentation. To overcome these limitations, we propose VisiFold. Our framework introduces a novel temporal folding graph that consolidates a sequence of temporal snapshots into a single graph. Furthermore, we present a node visibility mechanism that incorporates node-level masking and subgraph sampling to overcome the computational bottleneck imposed by large node counts. Extensive experiments show that VisiFold not only drastically reduces resource consumption but also outperforms existing baselines in long-term forecasting tasks. Remarkably, even with a high mask ratio of 80%, VisiFold maintains its performance advantage. By effectively breaking the resource constraints in both temporal and spatial dimensions, our work paves the way for more realistic long-term traffic forecasting. The code is available at~ https://github.com/PlanckChang/VisiFold.

Zhiwei Zhang, Xinyi Du, Weihao Wang +2

Key Laboratory of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence in Transportation (Beijing Jiaotong University), Ministry of Education · School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China · Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

Traffic Forecasting Long-Term Time Series Forecasting Spatiotemporal GNNs

Mar 12, 2026

Deep Learning Network-Temporal Models For Traffic Prediction

Accurate prediction of multivariate time series is essential for emerging network intelligent control, observability, and management functions. Existing statistical-based and shallow machine learning models have shown limited prediction capabilities on multivariate time series. They prioritize improvements in average prediction accuracy, while overlooking heterogeneous dependency structures and performance variability across individual time series. Recent advances in large language models have introduced new directions for multivariate time series forecasting; however, their application in conjunction with explicit structural dependency modeling remains relatively underexplored, especially in networked environments. In this paper, we present a topology-aware learning framework for large-scale network traffic prediction that explicitly models both temporal dynamics and structural dependencies in multivariate network time series. We first investigate a graph attention model designed to capture topology-induced correlations among network traffic time series. We then evaluate a fine-tuned large language model-based representations for improved generalization across heterogeneous traffic patterns. To further address the diversity of cross-correlations in high-dimensional traffic data, we introduce a clustering-based preprocessing stage that groups traffic flows with similar dependency characteristics prior to model training, reducing input complexity and improving learning stability. Experiments on real backbone traffic data show consistent improvements over statistical and recurrent neural network baselines. In addition to average accuracy, we evaluate performance across individual time series and observe reduced variability in prediction quality.

Yufeng Xin, Ethan Fan

RENCI, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Multivariate Time Series Forecasting LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting Traffic Forecasting Spatiotemporal GNNs

Mar 11, 2026

AI-Enhanced Spatial Cellular Traffic Demand Prediction with Contextual Clustering and Error Correction for 5G/6G Planning

Accurate spatial prediction of cellular traffic demand is essential for 5G NR capacity planning, network densification, and data-driven 6G planning. Although machine learning can fuse heterogeneous geospatial and socio-economic layers to estimate fine-grained demand maps, spatial autocorrelation can cause neighborhood leakage under naive train/test splits, inflating accuracy and weakening planning reliability. This paper presents an AI-driven framework that reduces leakage and improves spatial generalization via a context-aware two-stage splitting strategy with residual spatial error correction. Experiments using crowdsourced usage indicators across five major Canadian cities show consistent mean absolute error (MAE) reductions relative to location-only clustering, supporting more reliable bandwidth provisioning and evidence-based spectrum planning and sharing assessments.

Mohamad Alkadamani, Colin Brown, Halim Yanikomeroglu

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) · Carleton University · Communications Research Centre (CRC)

Traffic Forecasting Wireless Communications Spatial Generalization Data Contamination

Mar 1, 2026

DWAFM: Dynamic Weighted Graph Structure Embedding Integrated with Attention and Frequency-Domain MLPs for Traffic Forecasting

Accurate traffic prediction is a key task for intelligent transportation systems. The core difficulty lies in accurately modeling the complex spatial-temporal dependencies in traffic data. In recent years, improvements in network architecture have failed to bring significant performance enhancements, while embedding technology has shown great potential. However, existing embedding methods often ignore graph structure information or rely solely on static graph structures, making it difficult to effectively capture the dynamic associations between nodes that evolve over time. To address this issue, this letter proposes a novel dynamic weighted graph structure (DWGS) embedding method, which relies on a graph structure that can truly reflect the changes in the strength of dynamic associations between nodes over time. By first combining the DWGS embedding with the spatial-temporal adaptive embedding, as well as the temporal embedding and feature embedding, and then integrating attention and frequency-domain multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), we design a novel traffic prediction model, termed the DWGS embedding integrated with attention and frequency-domain MLPs (DWAFM). Experiments on five real-world traffic datasets show that the DWAFM achieves better prediction performance than some state-of-the-arts.

Sen Shi, Zhichao Zhang, Yangfan He

School of Mathematics and Statistics, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China · Hubei Key Laboratory of Applied Mathematics, Hubei University, Wuhan 430062, China · Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China +2

Traffic Forecasting Spatiotemporal Forecasting Intelligent Transportation Systems Dynamic Graph Learning

Feb 27, 2026

Time Series Foundation Models as Strong Baselines in Transportation Forecasting: A Large-Scale Benchmark Analysis

Accurate forecasting of transportation dynamics is essential for urban mobility and infrastructure planning. Although recent work has achieved strong performance with deep learning models, these methods typically require dataset-specific training, architecture design and hyper-parameter tuning. This paper evaluates whether general-purpose time-series foundation models can serve as forecasters for transportation tasks by benchmarking the zero-shot performance of the state-of-the-art model, Chronos-2, across ten real-world datasets covering highway traffic volume and flow, urban traffic speed, bike-sharing demand, and electric vehicle charging station data. Under a consistent evaluation protocol, we find that, even without any task-specific fine-tuning, Chronos-2 delivers state-of-the-art or competitive accuracy across most datasets, frequently outperforming classical statistical baselines and specialized deep learning architectures, particularly at longer horizons. Beyond point forecasting, we evaluate its native probabilistic outputs using prediction-interval coverage and sharpness, demonstrating that Chronos-2 also provides useful uncertainty quantification without dataset-specific training. In general, this study supports the adoption of time-series foundation models as a key baseline for transportation forecasting research.

Javier Yanes-Pulido, Filipe Rodrigues

Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

Time-Series Foundation Models Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting Traffic Forecasting Forecasting Benchmarks Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Feb 25, 2026

Learning from Yesterday's Error: An Efficient Online Learning Method for Traffic Demand Prediction

Accurately predicting short-term traffic demand is critical for intelligent transportation systems. While deep learning models achieve strong performance under stationary conditions, their accuracy often degrades significantly when faced with distribution shifts caused by external events or evolving urban dynamics. Frequent model retraining to adapt to such changes incurs prohibitive computational costs, especially for large-scale or foundation models. To address this challenge, we propose FORESEE (Forecasting Online with Residual Smoothing and Ensemble Experts), a lightweight online adaptation framework that is accurate, robust, and computationally efficient. FORESEE operates without any parameter updates to the base model. Instead, it corrects today's forecast in each region using yesterday's prediction error, stabilized through exponential smoothing guided by a mixture-of-experts mechanism that adapts to recent error dynamics. Moreover, an adaptive spatiotemporal smoothing component propagates error signals across neighboring regions and time slots, capturing coherent shifts in demand patterns. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets with three backbone models demonstrate that FORESEE consistently improves prediction accuracy, maintains robustness even when distribution shifts are minimal (avoiding performance degradation), and achieves the lowest computational overhead among existing online methods. By enabling real-time adaptation of traffic forecasting models with negligible computational cost, FORESEE paves the way for deploying reliable, up-to-date prediction systems in dynamic urban environments. Code and data are available at https://github.com/xiannanhuang/FORESEE

Xiannan Huang, Quan Yuan, Chao Yang

Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering, Ministry of Education at Tongji University, 4800 Cao’an Road, Shanghai, 201804, Shanghai, China · Urban Mobility Institute, Tongji University, 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai, 200092, Shanghai, China

Traffic Forecasting Time Series Forecasting Non-Stationary Time Series Forecasting Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Feb 25, 2026

Positional-aware Spatio-Temporal Network for Large-Scale Traffic Prediction

Traffic flow forecasting has emerged as an indispensable mission for daily life, which is required to utilize the spatiotemporal relationship between each location within a time period under a graph structure to predict future flow. However, the large travel demand for broader geographical areas and longer time spans requires models to distinguish each node clearly and possess a holistic view of the history, which has been paid less attention to in prior works. Furthermore, increasing sizes of data hinder the deployment of most models in real application environments. To this end, in this paper, we propose a lightweight Positional-aware Spatio-Temporal Network (PASTN) to effectively capture both temporal and spatial complexities in an end-to-end manner. PASTN introduces positional-aware embeddings to separate each node's representation, while also utilizing a temporal attention module to improve the long-range perception of current models. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and efficiency of PASTN across datasets of various scales (county, megalopolis and state). Further analysis demonstrates the efficacy of newly introduced modules either.

Runfei Chen

Urban Mobility Institute Tongji University Shanghai, China, 200092

Traffic Forecasting Spatiotemporal GNNs

Feb 17, 2026

MMCAformer: Macro-Micro Cross-Attention Transformer for Traffic Speed Prediction with Microscopic Connected Vehicle Driving Behavior

Accurate speed prediction is crucial for proactive traffic management to enhance traffic efficiency and safety. Existing studies have primarily relied on aggregated, macroscopic traffic flow data to predict future traffic trends, whereas road traffic dynamics are also influenced by individual, microscopic human driving behaviors. Recent Connected Vehicle (CV) data provide rich driving behavior features, offering new opportunities to incorporate these behavioral insights into speed prediction. To this end, we propose the Macro-Micro Cross-Attention Transformer (MMCAformer) to integrate CV data-based micro driving behavior features with macro traffic features for speed prediction. Specifically, MMCAformer employs self-attention to learn intrinsic dependencies in macro traffic flow and cross-attention to capture spatiotemporal interplays between macro traffic status and micro driving behavior. MMCAformer is optimized with a Student-t negative log-likelihood loss to provide point-wise speed prediction and estimate uncertainty. Experiments on four Florida freeways demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed MMCAformer compared to baselines. Compared with only using macro features, introducing micro driving behavior features not only enhances prediction accuracy (e.g., overall RMSE, MAE, and MAPE reduced by 9.0%, 6.9%, and 10.2%, respectively) but also shrinks model prediction uncertainty (e.g., mean predictive intervals decreased by 10.1-24.0% across the four freeways). Results reveal that hard braking and acceleration frequencies emerge as the most influential features. Such improvements are more pronounced under congested, low-speed traffic conditions.

Lei Han, Mohamed Abdel-Aty, Younggun Kim +2

Smart and Safe Transportation lab at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering, University of Central Florida, USA

Traffic Forecasting Spatiotemporal Forecasting Intelligent Transportation Systems

Feb 15, 2026

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

Spatio-temporal traffic forecasting is a core component of intelligent transportation systems, supporting various downstream tasks such as signal control and network-level traffic management. In real-world deployments, forecasting models must operate under structural and observational uncertainties, conditions that are rarely considered in model design. Recent approaches achieve strong short-term predictive performance by tightly coupling spatial and temporal modeling, often at the cost of increased complexity and limited modularity. In contrast, efficient time-series models capture long-range temporal dependencies without relying on explicit network structure. We propose UniST-Pred, a unified spatio-temporal forecasting framework that first decouples temporal modeling from spatial representation learning, then integrates both through adaptive representation-level fusion. To assess robustness of the proposed approach, we construct a dataset based on an agent-based, microscopic traffic simulator (MATSim) and evaluate UniST-Pred under severe network disconnection scenarios. Additionally, we benchmark UniST-Pred on standard traffic prediction datasets, demonstrating its competitive performance against existing well-established models despite a lightweight design. The results illustrate that UniST-Pred maintains strong predictive performance across both real-world and simulated datasets, while also yielding interpretable spatio-temporal representations under infrastructure disruptions. The source code and the generated dataset are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UniST-Pred-EF27

Yue Wang, Djellel Difallah, Areg Karapetyan +1

New York University Abu Dhabi

Intelligent Transportation Systems Spatiotemporal Forecasting Traffic Forecasting

Nov 26, 2025

HieraMix: A Hierarchical MLP-Mixer for Large-Scale Traffic Forecasting

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, Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Mixer (HieraMix), which leverages an all-MLP architecture for efficient and effective large-scale traffic forecasting. HieraMix 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.

Yongyao Wang, Xie Yu, Jingyuan Wang +2

1State Key Laboratory of Complex & Critical Software Environment (SKLCCSE) · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China · 3MOE Engineering Research Center of Advanced Computer Application Technology, Beihang University, China

Intelligent Transportation Systems Spatiotemporal Forecasting Traffic Forecasting Multiscale Time-Series Modeling

Apr 10, 2025

Efficient Traffic State Prediction With Dynamic Joint Spatio-Temporal Relation Inference

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.

Zhifeng Hao, Kai Hu, Juncai Zhang +2

School of Cyberspace Security, Hainan University, Haikou, China

Temporal Convolutional Networks Dynamic Graph Learning Traffic Forecasting Spatiotemporal GNNs

Aug 2, 2024

Spatio-Temporal Partial Sensing Forecast for Long-term Traffic

Traffic forecasting uses recent measurements by sensors installed at chosen locations to forecast the future road traffic. Existing work either assumes all locations are equipped with sensors or focuses on short-term forecast. This paper studies partial sensing forecast of long-term traffic, assuming sensors are available only at some locations. The problem is challenging due to the unknown data distribution at unsensed locations, the intricate spatio-temporal correlation in long-term forecasting, as well as noise to traffic patterns. We propose a Spatio-temporal Long-term Partial sensing Forecast model (SLPF) for traffic prediction, with several novel contributions, including a rank-based embedding technique to reduce the impact of noise in data, a spatial transfer matrix to overcome the spatial distribution shift from sensed locations to unsensed locations, and a multi-step training process that utilizes all available data to successively refine the model parameters for better accuracy. Extensive experiments on several real-world traffic datasets demonstrate its superior performance. Our source code is at https://github.com/zbliu98/SLPF

Zibo Liu, Zhe Jiang, Zelin Xu +5

Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, University of Florida · Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky

Long-Term Time Series Forecasting Spatiotemporal Forecasting Traffic Forecasting