# GT-CausIn: a novel causal-based insight for traffic prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.05782 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05782/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time-series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07719/) (2021)
- [Deep Multi-View Spatial-Temporal Network for Taxi Demand Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08714/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Prediction: Benchmark and Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14917/) (2021)
- [ETA Prediction with Graph Neural Networks in Google Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11482/) (2021)
- [BCD Nets: Scalable Variational Approaches for Bayesian Causal Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02761/) (2021)
- [Learning Traffic as Images: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Large-Scale Transportation Network Speed Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04245/) (2017)
- [Predicting Station-level Hourly Demands in a Large-scale Bike-sharing Network: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04997/) (2017)
- [Recursive Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Latent Variables and Selection Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12036/) (2021)
- [Interventional Sum-Product Networks: Causal Inference with Tractable Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10440/) (2021)
- [Iterative Causal Discovery in the Possible Presence of Latent Confounders and Selection Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04095/) (2021)
- [PGCN: Progressive Graph Convolutional Networks for Spatial-Temporal Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08982/) (2022)
- [Causal Discovery using Compression-Complexity Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09336/) (2020)

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

- [TraffNet: Learning Causality of Traffic Generation for What-if Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15954/) (2023)
- [MSCT: Addressing Time-Varying Confounding with Marginal Structural Causal Transformer for Counterfactual Post-Crash Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14065/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic forecasting is an important application of spatiotemporal series prediction. Among different methods, graph neural networks have achieved so far the most promising results, learning relations between graph nodes then becomes a crucial task. However, improvement space is very limited when these relations are learned in a node-to-node manner. The challenge stems from (1) obscure temporal dependencies between different stations, (2) difficulties in defining variables beyond the node level, and (3) no ready-made method to validate the learned relations. To confront these challenges, we define legitimate traffic causal variables to discover the causal relation inside the traffic network, which is carefully checked with statistic tools and case analysis. We then present a novel model named Graph Spatial-Temporal Network Based on Causal Insight (GT-CausIn), where prior learned causal information is integrated with graph diffusion layers and temporal convolutional network (TCN) layers. Experiments are carried out on two real-world traffic datasets: PEMS-BAY and METR-LA, which show that GT-CausIn significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models on mid-term and long-term prediction.