MetaSTC: A Backbone Agnostic Spatio-Temporal Framework for Traffic Forecasting
Kexin Xu, Zhemeng Yu, Yucen Gao, Songjian Zhang, Jun Fang, Xiaofeng Gao, Guihai Chen · 2024
Traffic flow prediction is a critical issue in transportation engineering and presents distinct challenges when handling large-scale datasets in the real world. Existing complex spatio-temporal forecasting paradigms use the same parameters to fit traffic sequences with varying spatio-temporal features, and tend to train an average performance model over different time series. This approach greatly reduces their accuracy when applied to larger road networks. Moreover, the significant differences in traffic data distribution from one city to another can also pose great challenges. The same model may be excellent for one city and mediocre when applied to another. To this end, we propose a Meta Backbone Agnostic Spatio-Temporal Clustering Framework for Traffic Forecasting on Large-Scale Road Networks named MetaSTC. We tackle the disparities of spatio-temporal features of traffic flow through a spatio-temporal clustering-based strategy. We design meta-learner for large-scale road network that dynamically extracts the shared information across roads in the same sub-task. In this way, the model can represent task-specific details with a simpler model and make quick and accurate predictions. Our paradigm is backbone-agnostic and can be combined with different traffic prediction models, solving the problem caused by the difference in data distribution. Extensive experimental results conducted on real-world traffic dataset demonstrate the high accuracy and computational efficiency of our model over SOTA approaches.