A lightweight spatio-temporal neural network with sampling-based time series decomposition for traffic forecasting

The escalating challenges in urban traffic highlight the importance of accurate traffic forecasting for enhancing the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), given its pivotal role in optimizing traffic management strategies. Due to the impressive performance of Graph Neural Networks in spatio-temporal data analysis, Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have emerged as a mainstream approach for traffic forecasting. However, many recent STGNN-based works often utilize redundant and intricate architectures, leading to increased computational costs with only minor improvements in performance. To solve this issue, we propose a concise but effective Lightweight Spatio-Temporal Neural Network architecture, LSTNN. Specifically, we design two sampling strategies, downsampling and patched sampling, to decompose the time series and separately fit the seasonal component and trend components. Based on sampling strategies, we introduce a spatio-temporal localization module based on the raw traffic data and learnable spatio-temporal indexing. In particular, this module models spatio-temporal correlations by appending the spatio-temporal indexing to the traffic sequences. We visualized the spatio-temporal indexing, confirming the effectiveness of the spatio-temporal localization module design. Extensive experiments are conducted on four widely utilized real-world traffic datasets, showing the significant improvement of LSTNNcompared to baselines, including several state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, we conducted extensive experiments on four long-term time series datasets to validate the effectiveness of LSTNNin the Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF) task. Our findings may inspire and encourage the design of more concise neural prediction architectures for real-world applications. We release the datasets and baseline implementations at: github.com/HduDBSI/LSTNN Copyright © 2025 IEEE.