STformer: A Noise-Aware Efficient Spatio-Temporal Transformer Architecture for Traffic Forecasting

Traffic forecasting plays an indispensable role in the intelligent transportation system, which makes daily travel more convenient and safer. However, the dynamic evolution of spatio-temporal correlations makes accurate traffic forecasting very difficult. Existing work mainly employs graph neural netwroks (GNNs) and deep time series models (e.g., recurrent neural networks) to capture complex spatio-temporal patterns in the dynamic traffic system. For the spatial patterns, it is difficult for GNNs to extract the global spatial information, i.e., remote sensors information in road networks. Although we can use the self-attention to extract global spatial information as in the previous work, it is also accompanied by huge resource consumption. For the temporal patterns, traffic data have not only easy-to-recognize daily and weekly trends but also difficult-to-recognize short-term noise caused by accidents (e.g., car accidents and thunderstorms). Prior traffic models are difficult to distinguish intricate temporal patterns in time series and thus hard to get accurate temporal dependence. To address above issues, we propose a novel noise-aware efficient spatio-temporal Transformer architecture for accurate traffic forecasting, named STformer. STformer consists of two components, which are the noise-aware temporal self-attention (NATSA) and the graph-based sparse spatial self-attention (GBS3A). NATSA separates the high-frequency component and the low-frequency component from the time series to remove noise and capture stable temporal dependence by the learnable filter and the temporal self-attention, respectively. GBS3A replaces the full query in vanilla self-attention with the graph-based sparse query to decrease the time and memory usage. Experiments on four real-world traffic datasets show that STformer outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with lower computational cost.