Long-Term Traffic Flow Prediction for Highways Based on STLLformer Model

Long-term traffic flow prediction (LTFP) is crucial for intelligent transportation systems but remains challenging due to complex spatiotemporal dependencies and multi-scale temporal patterns. While recent models like Autoformer have introduced decomposition techniques, they often lack tailored mechanisms for traffic data’s unique characteristics, such as strong periodicity and long-range spatial correlations. To address this gap, we propose STLLformer, a novel spatiotemporal Transformer that establishes a seasonal-dominated, multi-component collaborative forecasting paradigm. Unlike existing approaches that merely combine decomposition with graph networks, STLLformer features: (1) a dedicated encoder–decoder architecture for separate yet synergistic modeling of trend, seasonal, and residual components; (2) a seasonal-driven autocorrelation mechanism that purely captures cyclical patterns by filtering out trend and noise interference; and (3) a low-rank graph convolutional module specifically designed to capture dynamic, long-range spatial dependencies in road networks. Experiments on two real-world traffic datasets (PEMSD8 and HHY) demonstrate that STLLformer outperforms strong baseline methods (including LSTGCN, LSTM, and ARIMA), achieving an average improvement of over 10% in MAE and RMSE (e.g., on PEMSD8 for 6-h prediction, MAE drops from 36.87 to 30.34), with statistical significance (p < 0.01). This work provides a more refined and effective decomposition-fusion solution for traffic forecasting, which holds practical promise for enhancing urban traffic management and alleviating congestion.