Multi-scale Wavelet-Mamba framework for spatiotemporal traffic forecasting.
Wenhao Li, Jiale Song, Pengying Ouyang, Yicai Zhang
Abstract
Open AccessNetwork traffic prediction is essential for intelligent resource management in modern transportation systems, but existing methods struggle to simultaneously capture multi-scale temporal patterns, long-range dependencies, and periodic behaviors while maintaining computational efficiency. This paper presents WMF-Traffic (Wavelet-Mamba-Fourier Traffic prediction framework), a novel traffic forecasting approach that synergistically integrates wavelet decomposition, selective state space modeling, and frequency domain processing. The framework introduces four key components: Multi-scale Wavelet Decomposition for hierarchical temporal pattern extraction, Wavelet Traffic Convolution with scale-adaptive mechanisms, Traffic-aware Mamba for efficient long-range dependency modeling, and Fourier Pattern Adjustment for periodic pattern enhancement. WMF-Traffic employs a comprehensive training objective that balances reconstruction accuracy, temporal consistency, and spectral coherence. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets (METR-LA, PEMS-BAY, PEMS04, PEMS08) demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving 1.0-1.3% gains in MAE, 0.6-1.1% in RMSE, and 0.2-1.0% in MAPE across different prediction horizons. Ablation studies reveal that Traffic-aware Mamba provides the largest individual contribution (10.2% MAE reduction), while the complete framework achieves up to 27.1% improvement over baseline approaches. The proposed uncertainty-based fusion mechanism further enhances robustness with 3.2-4.1% additional improvements.