# STG4Traffic: A Survey and Benchmark of Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.00495 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00495/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (2020)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [Graph Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11174/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09641/) (2020)
- [Spatial-Temporal Graph ODE Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12931/) (2021)
- [Discrete Graph Structure Learning for Forecasting Multiple Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06861/) (2021)
- [GaAN: Gated Attention Networks for Learning on Large and Spatiotemporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07294/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Prediction: Benchmark and Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14917/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Temporal Identity: A Simple yet Effective Baseline for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05233/) (2022)
- [Graph Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03558/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09112/) (2022)
- [Pre-training Enhanced Spatial-temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09113/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervised Learning for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04475/) (2022)
- [DL-Traff: Survey and Benchmark of Deep Learning Models for Urban Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09091/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [A Survey of Generative Techniques for Spatial-Temporal Data Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09592/) (2024)
- [STDCformer: A Transformer-Based Model with a Spatial-Temporal Causal De-Confounding Strategy for Crowd Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02942/) (2024)
- [ADFormer: Aggregation Differential Transformer for Passenger Demand Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02576/) (2025)
- [Incorporating Long-term Data in Training Short-term Traffic Prediction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14726/) (2024)
- [Unveiling the Inflexibility of Adaptive Embedding in Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11448/) (2024)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Managing Temporal Granularity in Spatio-Temporal Data for Fine-Grained Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09392/) (2026)
- [Efficient Traffic Prediction at Scale: A Systematic Study of STGCN Architectural Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09539/) (2026)
- [Just for FUNS: LLM-Guided Spatio-Temporal Graph Node Generation for Forecasting Unobserved Node States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08818/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic prediction has been an active research topic in the domain of spatial-temporal data mining. Accurate real-time traffic prediction is essential to improve the safety, stability, and versatility of smart city systems, i.e., traffic control and optimal routing. The complex and highly dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies make effective predictions still face many challenges. Recent studies have shown that spatial-temporal graph neural networks exhibit great potential applied to traffic prediction, which combines sequential models with graph convolutional networks to jointly model temporal and spatial correlations. However, a survey study of graph learning, spatial-temporal graph models for traffic, as well as a fair comparison of baseline models are pending and unavoidable issues. In this paper, we first provide a systematic review of graph learning strategies and commonly used graph convolution algorithms. Then we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of recently proposed spatial-temporal graph network models. Furthermore, we build a study called STG4Traffic using the deep learning framework PyTorch to establish a standardized and scalable benchmark on two types of traffic datasets. We can evaluate their performance by personalizing the model settings with uniform metrics. Finally, we point out some problems in the current study and discuss future directions. Source codes are available at https://github.com/trainingl/STG4Traffic.