STEFT: Spatio-Temporal Embedding Fusion Transformer for Traffic Prediction

Abstract

Accurate traffic prediction is crucial for optimizing taxi demand, managing traffic flow, and planning public transportation routes. Traditional models often fail to capture complex spatial–temporal dependencies. To tackle this, we introduce the Spatio-Temporal Embedding Fusion Transformer (STEFT). This deep learning model leverages attention mechanisms and feature fusion to effectively model dynamic dependencies in traffic data. STEFT includes an Embedding Fusion Network that integrates spatial, temporal, and flow embeddings, preserving original flow information. The Flow Block uses an enhanced Transformer encoder to capture periodic dependencies within neighboring regions, while the Prediction Block forecasts inflow and outflow dynamics using a fully connected network. Experiments on NYC (New York City) Taxi and NYC Bike datasets show STEFT’s superior performance over baseline methods in RMSE and MAPE metrics, highlighting the effectiveness of the concatenation-based feature fusion approach. Ablation studies confirm the contribution of each component, underscoring STEFT’s potential for real-world traffic prediction and other spatial–temporal challenges.