# Unified Spatio-Temporal Modeling for Traffic Forecasting using Graph Neural Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12518 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12518/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02908/) (2020)
- [ST-GRAT: A Novel Spatio-temporal Graph Attention Network for Accurately Forecasting Dynamically Changing Road Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13181/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10569/) (2023)
- [Disentangled Spatiotemporal Graph Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00411/) (2022)
- [Graph Neural Network for spatiotemporal data: methods and applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00012/) (2023)
- [LSTTN: A Long-Short Term Transformer-based Spatio-temporal Neural Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16495/) (2024)
- [SwinUNet3D -- A Hierarchical Architecture for Deep Traffic Prediction using Shifted Window Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06390/) (2022)
- [Graph Attention Network for Lane-Wise and Topology-Invariant Intersection Traffic Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07446/) (2024)
- [STLGRU: Spatio-Temporal Lightweight Graph GRU for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04548/) (2022)
- [Toward Equitable Low-Carbon Mobility: Fairness-Aware Demand Prediction for Expanding Bike-Sharing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26451/) (2026)
- [Beyond the Graph: An Adaptive Meta-Learner Fuses Explainability, Weather, and Dynamics for Robust Bus ETA Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31667/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Research in deep learning models to forecast traffic intensities has gained great attention in recent years due to their capability to capture the complex spatio-temporal relationships within the traffic data. However, most state-of-the-art approaches have designed spatial-only (e.g. Graph Neural Networks) and temporal-only (e.g. Recurrent Neural Networks) modules to separately extract spatial and temporal features. However, we argue that it is less effective to extract the complex spatio-temporal relationship with such factorized modules. Besides, most existing works predict the traffic intensity of a particular time interval only based on the traffic data of the previous one hour of that day. And thereby ignores the repetitive daily/weekly pattern that may exist in the last hour of data. Therefore, we propose a Unified Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolution Network (USTGCN) for traffic forecasting that performs both spatial and temporal aggregation through direct information propagation across different timestamp nodes with the help of spectral graph convolution on a spatio-temporal graph. Furthermore, it captures historical daily patterns in previous days and current-day patterns in current-day traffic data. Finally, we validate our work's effectiveness through experimental analysis, which shows that our model USTGCN can outperform state-of-the-art performances in three popular benchmark datasets from the Performance Measurement System (PeMS). Moreover, the training time is reduced significantly with our proposed USTGCN model.