# Towards Spatio-Temporal Aware Traffic Time Series Forecasting--Full Version

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15737 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15737/

## Key facts

- Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Filter Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09673/) (2016)
- [Structured Sequence Modeling with Graph Convolutional Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07659/) (2016)
- [CondConv: Conditionally Parameterized Convolutions for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04971/) (2019)
- [Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09641/) (2020)
- [Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15358/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02908/) (2020)
- [Adversarially Regularized Graph Autoencoder for Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04407/) (2018)
- [STG2Seq: Spatial-temporal Graph to Sequence Model for Multi-step Passenger Demand Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10069/) (2019)
- [AutoCTS: Automated Correlated Time Series Forecasting -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11174/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Path Representation Learning with Curriculum Negative Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09373/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Time Series Outlier Detection with Diversity-Driven Convolutional Ensembles -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11108/) (2021)
- [Graph Attention Recurrent Neural Networks for Correlated Time Series Forecasting -- Full version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10760/) (2021)
- [Latent Space Model for Road Networks to Predict Time-Varying Traffic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04301/) (2016)
- [Meta Multi-Task Learning for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08969/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Triformer: Triangular, Variable-Specific Attentions for Long Sequence Multivariate Time Series Forecasting--Full Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13767/) (2022)
- [LightTS: Lightweight Time Series Classification with Adaptive Ensemble Distillation -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12721/) (2023)
- [LightPath: Lightweight and Scalable Path Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10171/) (2023)
- [INCREASE: Inductive Graph Representation Learning for Spatio-Temporal Kriging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02738/) (2023)
- [Spatial-Temporal-Decoupled Masked Pre-training for Spatiotemporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00516/) (2023)
- [TSGBench: Time Series Generation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03755/) (2023)
- [Cross-city Few-Shot Traffic Forecasting via Traffic Pattern Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09727/) (2023)
- [Joint Neural Architecture and Hyperparameter Search for Correlated Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16126/) (2022)
- [Robust and Explainable Autoencoders for Unsupervised Time Series Outlier Detection---Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03341/) (2022)
- [FlashST: A Simple and Universal Prompt-Tuning Framework for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17898/) (2024)
- [Weakly-supervised Temporal Path Representation Learning with Contrastive Curriculum Learning -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16110/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Hypergraph Structure Learning for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12028/) (2023)
- [GPT-ST: Generative Pre-Training of Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04245/) (2023)
- [STAEformer: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Embedding Makes Vanilla Transformer SOTA for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10425/) (2023)
- [MCformer: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Mixed-Channels Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09223/) (2024)
- [PhaseFormer: From Patches to Phases for Efficient and Effective Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04134/) (2025)
- [Learning Informative Representation for Fairness-aware Multivariate Time-series Forecasting: A Group-based Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11535/) (2023)
- [GBT: Two-stage transformer framework for non-stationary time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08302/) (2023)
- [A Co-training Approach for Noisy Time Series Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12551/) (2023)
- [SAGDFN: A Scalable Adaptive Graph Diffusion Forecasting Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12282/) (2024)
- [K2VAE: A Koopman-Kalman Enhanced Variational AutoEncoder for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23017/) (2025)
- [Distributional Drift Adaptation with Temporal Conditional Variational Autoencoder for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00654/) (2022)
- [Multi-scale Traffic Pattern Bank for Cross-city Few-shot Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00397/) (2024)
- [Segment, Shuffle, and Stitch: A Simple Layer for Improving Time-Series Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20082/) (2024)
- [FDTI: Fine-grained Deep Traffic Inference with Roadnet-enriched Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10945/) (2023)
- [Sequential Order-Robust Mamba for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23356/) (2024)
- [Frequency Enhanced Pre-training for Cross-city Few-shot Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02614/) (2024)
- [How Different from the Past? Spatio-Temporal Time Series Forecasting with Self-Supervised Deviation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04908/) (2025)
- [MegaCRN: Meta-Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Spatio-Temporal Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05989/) (2022)
- [FDNet: Focal Decomposed Network for Efficient, Robust and Practical Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10703/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic time series forecasting is challenging due to complex spatio-temporal dynamics time series from different locations often have distinct patterns; and for the same time series, patterns may vary across time, where, for example, there exist certain periods across a day showing stronger temporal correlations. Although recent forecasting models, in particular deep learning based models, show promising results, they suffer from being spatio-temporal agnostic. Such spatio-temporal agnostic models employ a shared parameter space irrespective of the time series locations and the time periods and they assume that the temporal patterns are similar across locations and do not evolve across time, which may not always hold, thus leading to sub-optimal results. In this work, we propose a framework that aims at turning spatio-temporal agnostic models to spatio-temporal aware models. To do so, we encode time series from different locations into stochastic variables, from which we generate location-specific and time-varying model parameters to better capture the spatio-temporal dynamics. We show how to integrate the framework with canonical attentions to enable spatio-temporal aware attentions. Next, to compensate for the additional overhead introduced by the spatio-temporal aware model parameter generation process, we propose a novel window attention scheme, which helps reduce the complexity from quadratic to linear, making spatio-temporal aware attentions also have competitive efficiency. We show strong empirical evidence on four traffic time series datasets, where the proposed spatio-temporal aware attentions outperform state-of-the-art methods in term of accuracy and efficiency. This is an extended version of "Towards Spatio-Temporal Aware Traffic Time Series Forecasting", to appear in ICDE 2022 [1], including additional experimental results.