# STJLA: A Multi-Context Aware Spatio-Temporal Joint Linear Attention Network for Traffic Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02262 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02262/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Predict then Propagate: Graph Neural Networks meet Personalized PageRank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05997/) (2018)
- [Representation Learning on Graphs with Jumping Knowledge Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03536/) (2018)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08083/) (2016)
- [DropEdge: Towards Deep Graph Convolutional Networks on Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10903/) (2019)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08458/) (2015)
- [Efficient Content-Based Sparse Attention with Routing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05997/) (2020)
- [MixHop: Higher-Order Graph Convolutional Architectures via Sparsified Neighborhood Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00067/) (2019)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Improves Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05485/) (2019)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic prediction has gradually attracted the attention of researchers because of the increase in traffic big data. Therefore, how to mine the complex spatio-temporal correlations in traffic data to predict traffic conditions more accurately become a difficult problem. Previous works combined graph convolution networks (GCNs) and self-attention mechanism with deep time series models (e.g. recurrent neural networks) to capture the spatio-temporal correlations separately, ignoring the relationships across time and space. Besides, GCNs are limited by over-smoothing issue and self-attention is limited by quadratic problem, result in GCNs lack global representation capabilities, and self-attention inefficiently capture the global spatial dependence. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model for traffic forecasting, named Multi-Context Aware Spatio-Temporal Joint Linear Attention (STJLA), which applies linear attention to the spatio-temporal joint graph to capture global dependence between all spatio-temporal nodes efficiently. More specifically, STJLA utilizes static structural context and dynamic semantic context to improve model performance. The static structure context based on node2vec and one-hot encoding enriches the spatio-temporal position information. Furthermore, the multi-head diffusion convolution network based dynamic spatial context enhances the local spatial perception ability, and the GRU based dynamic temporal context stabilizes sequence position information of the linear attention, respectively. Experiments on two real-world traffic datasets, England and PEMSD7, demonstrate that our STJLA can achieve up to 9.83% and 3.08% accuracy improvement in MAE measure over state-of-the-art baselines.