# From Coarse to Fine: Managing Temporal Granularity in Spatio-Temporal Data for Fine-Grained Traffic Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09392 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09392/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [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)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [DropEdge: Towards Deep Graph Convolutional Networks on Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10903/) (2019)
- [Cluster-GCN: An Efficient Algorithm for Training Deep and Large Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07953/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [TimeMixer: Decomposable Multiscale Mixing for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14616/) (2024)
- [CSRNet: Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks for Understanding the Highly Congested Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10062/) (2018)
- [Spatial-Temporal Graph ODE Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12931/) (2021)
- [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)
- [PDFormer: Propagation Delay-Aware Dynamic Long-Range Transformer for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07945/) (2023)
- [Stronger, Faster and More Explainable: A Graph Convolutional Baseline for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09978/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Meta-Graph Learning for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14701/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05055/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Graph Representation Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01855/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Joint Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13684/) (2021)
- [MLPST: MLP is All You Need for Spatio-Temporal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13363/) (2023)
- [Comprehensive Review of Neural Differential Equations for Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09885/) (2025)
- [Causal conditional hidden Markov model for multimodal traffic prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08249/) (2023)
- [MTSCI: A Conditional Diffusion Model for Multivariate Time Series Consistent Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05740/) (2024)
- [Vision-Enhanced Time Series Forecasting via Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14887/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficient acquisition, storage, and utilization of traffic data are critical challenges in spatio-temporal data management. Most traffic data systems collect and store observations at fixed, coarse-grained temporal intervals to reduce storage and computation costs. However, such coarse-grained data severely limits downstream applications that require predictions at a finer temporal granularity. Collecting and maintaining fine-grained traffic data across all locations and time periods would impose a substantial burden on database storage and preprocessing pipelines. To address this temporal granularity mismatch, we formulate a novel problem: predicting fine-grained future traffic using coarse-grained sampled data. We propose the Spatial-Temporal Refinement Predictor (STRP), a granularity-aware framework for spatio-temporal data systems. STRP integrates two components: Tree Convolution for efficient and interpretable spatial dependency modeling, and Inverse Dilated Convolution for progressive temporal extrapolation. STRP supports two practical prediction settings: window-based and duration-based, to handle different forms of granularity mismatch. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that STRP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and efficiency. Our work offers a practical and interpretable approach to managing granularity mismatches in spatio-temporal traffic data systems.