# Airport Passenger Flow Forecasting via Deformable Temporal-Spectral Transformer Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11845 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11845/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Pathformer: Multi-scale Transformers with Adaptive Pathways for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05956/) (2024)
- [FilterNet: Harnessing Frequency Filters for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01623/) (2024)
- [DPT: Deformable Patch-based Transformer for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14467/) (2021)
- [Deep-learning Architecture for Short-term Passenger Flow Forecasting in Urban Rail Transit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12563/) (2019)
- [FreEformer: Frequency Enhanced Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13989/) (2025)
- [A Spatio-Temporal Approach with Self-Corrective Causal Inference for Flight Delay Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15185/) (2024)
- [Efficient Large-Scale Urban Parking Prediction: Graph Coarsening Based on Real-Time Parking Service Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04022/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate forecasting of passenger flows is critical for maintaining the efficiency and resilience of airport operations. Recent advances in patch-based Transformer models have shown strong potential in various time series forecasting tasks. However, most existing methods rely on fixed-size patch embedding, making it difficult to model the complex and heterogeneous patterns of airport passenger flows. To address this issue, this paper proposes a deformable temporal-spectral transformer named DTSFormer that integrates a multiscale deformable partitioning module and a joint temporal-spectral filtering module. Specifically, the input sequence is dynamically partitioned into multiscale temporal patches via a novel window function-based masking, enabling the extraction of heterogeneous trends across different temporal stages. Then, within each scale, a frequency-domain attention mechanism is designed to capture both high- and low-frequency components, thereby emphasizing the volatility and periodicity inherent in airport passenger flows. Finally, the resulting multi-frequency features are subsequently fused in the time domain to jointly model short-term fluctuations and long-term trends. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on real-world passenger flow data collected at Beijing Capital International Airport from January 2023 to March 2024. The results indicate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art forecasting models across different prediction horizons. Further analysis shows that the deformable partitioning module aligns patch lengths with dominant periods and heterogeneous trends, enabling superior capture of sudden high-frequency fluctuations.