# Explainable Graph Pyramid Autoformer for Long-Term Traffic Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13123 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13123/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [A Multi-Horizon Quantile Recurrent Forecaster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11053/) (2017)
- [Triformer: Triangular, Variable-Specific Attentions for Long Sequence Multivariate Time Series Forecasting--Full Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13767/) (2022)
- [Graph Markov Network for Traffic Forecasting with Missing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05457/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Attention-based Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural ODE for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00985/) (2023)
- [Long-Horizon Traffic Forecasting via Incident-Aware Conformal Spatio-Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16857/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate traffic forecasting is vital to an intelligent transportation system. Although many deep learning models have achieved state-of-art performance for short-term traffic forecasting of up to 1 hour, long-term traffic forecasting that spans multiple hours remains a major challenge. Moreover, most of the existing deep learning traffic forecasting models are black box, presenting additional challenges related to explainability and interpretability. We develop Graph Pyramid Autoformer (X-GPA), an explainable attention-based spatial-temporal graph neural network that uses a novel pyramid autocorrelation attention mechanism. It enables learning from long temporal sequences on graphs and improves long-term traffic forecasting accuracy. Our model can achieve up to 35 % better long-term traffic forecast accuracy than that of several state-of-the-art methods. The attention-based scores from the X-GPA model provide spatial and temporal explanations based on the traffic dynamics, which change for normal vs. peak-hour traffic and weekday vs. weekend traffic.