STAEformer: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Embedding Makes Vanilla Transformer SOTA for Traffic Forecasting

With the rapid development of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), accurate traffic forecasting has emerged as a critical challenge. The key bottleneck lies in capturing the intricate spatio-temporal traffic patterns. In recent years, numerous neural networks with complicated architectures have been proposed to address this issue. However, the advancements in network architectures have encountered diminishing performance gains. In this study, we present a novel component called spatio-temporal adaptive embedding that can yield outstanding results with vanilla transformers. Our proposed Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Embedding transformer (STAEformer) achieves state-of-the-art performance on five real-world traffic forecasting datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that spatio-temporal adaptive embedding plays a crucial role in traffic forecasting by effectively capturing intrinsic spatio-temporal relations and chronological information in traffic time series.

Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Embedding Makes Vanilla Transformer SOTA for Traffic Forecasting

With the rapid development of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), accurate traffic forecasting has emerged as a critical challenge. The key bottleneck lies in capturing the intricate spatio-temporal traffic patterns. In recent years, numerous neural networks with complicated architectures have been proposed to address this issue. However, the advancements in network architectures have encountered diminishing performance gains. In this study, we present a novel component called spatio-temporal adaptive embedding that can yield outstanding results with vanilla transformers. Our proposed Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Embedding transformer (STAEformer) achieves state-of-the-art performance on five real-world traffic forecasting datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that spatio-temporal adaptive embedding plays a crucial role in traffic forecasting by effectively capturing intrinsic spatio-temporal relations and chronological information in traffic time series.

DL-Traff: Survey and Benchmark of Deep Learning Models for Urban Traffic Prediction

Nowadays, with the rapid development of IoT (Internet of Things) and CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) technologies, big spatiotemporal data are being generated from mobile phones, car navigation systems, and traffic sensors. By leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning technologies on such data, urban traffic prediction has drawn a lot of attention in AI and Intelligent Transportation System community. The problem can be uniformly modeled with a 3D tensor (T, N, C), where T denotes the total time steps, N denotes the size of the spatial domain (i.e., mesh-grids or graph-nodes), and C denotes the channels of information. According to the specific modeling strategy, the state-of-the-art deep learning models can be divided into three categories: grid-based, graph-based, and multivariate time-series models. In this study, we first synthetically review the deep traffic models as well as the widely used datasets, then build a standard benchmark to comprehensively evaluate their performances with the same settings and metrics. Our study named DL-Traff is implemented with two most popular deep learning frameworks, i.e., TensorFlow and PyTorch, which is already publicly available as two GitHub repositories https://github.com/deepkashiwa20/DL-Traff-Grid and https://github.com/deepkashiwa20/DL-Traff-Graph. With DL-Traff, we hope to deliver a useful resource to researchers who are interested in spatiotemporal data analysis.