# Learning from Yesterday's Error: An Efficient Online Learning Method for Traffic Demand Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21757 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21757/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [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)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [MEMO: Test Time Robustness via Adaptation and Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09506/) (2021)
- [Robust Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13899/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks for Time Series: Forecasting, Classification, Imputation, and Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03759/) (2023)
- [UniST: A Prompt-Empowered Universal Model for Urban Spatio-Temporal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11838/) (2024)
- [OneNet: Enhancing Time Series Forecasting Models under Concept Drift by Online Ensembling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12659/) (2023)
- [STG2Seq: Spatial-temporal Graph to Sequence Model for Multi-step Passenger Demand Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10069/) (2019)
- [Spatiotemporal Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Traffic Prediction in Transportation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02699/) (2017)
- [Battling the Non-stationarity in Time Series Forecasting via Test-time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04970/) (2025)
- [OpenCity: Open Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10269/) (2024)
- [Calibration of Time-Series Forecasting: Detecting and Adapting Context-Driven Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14838/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models for Spatio-Temporal Data Science: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13502/) (2025)
- [Proactive Model Adaptation Against Concept Drift for Online Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08435/) (2024)
- [Lightweight Online Adaption for Time Series Foundation Model Forecasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12920/) (2025)
- [Accurate Parameter-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23424/) (2025)
- [Addressing Concept Shift in Online Time Series Forecasting: Detect-then-Adapt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14949/) (2024)
- [Improving short-term bike sharing demand forecast through an irregular convolutional neural network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04376/) (2022)
- [Evaluating the Generalization Ability of Spatiotemporal Model in Urban Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04740/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Intra-Period and Inter-Period Features for Enhanced Passenger Flow Prediction of Subway Stations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14727/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning the Context of Errors: Black-Box Online Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14222/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurately predicting short-term traffic demand is critical for intelligent transportation systems. While deep learning models achieve strong performance under stationary conditions, their accuracy often degrades significantly when faced with distribution shifts caused by external events or evolving urban dynamics. Frequent model retraining to adapt to such changes incurs prohibitive computational costs, especially for large-scale or foundation models. To address this challenge, we propose FORESEE (Forecasting Online with Residual Smoothing and Ensemble Experts), a lightweight online adaptation framework that is accurate, robust, and computationally efficient. FORESEE operates without any parameter updates to the base model. Instead, it corrects today's forecast in each region using yesterday's prediction error, stabilized through exponential smoothing guided by a mixture-of-experts mechanism that adapts to recent error dynamics. Moreover, an adaptive spatiotemporal smoothing component propagates error signals across neighboring regions and time slots, capturing coherent shifts in demand patterns. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets with three backbone models demonstrate that FORESEE consistently improves prediction accuracy, maintains robustness even when distribution shifts are minimal (avoiding performance degradation), and achieves the lowest computational overhead among existing online methods. By enabling real-time adaptation of traffic forecasting models with negligible computational cost, FORESEE paves the way for deploying reliable, up-to-date prediction systems in dynamic urban environments. Code and data are available at https://github.com/xiannanhuang/FORESEE