A Data-Driven Spatiotemporal Feature Fusion Method for Traffic Flow Prediction

In response to the current severe traffic congestion issues, highly reliable traffic flow prediction serves as a fundamental prerequisite for optimizing municipal road networks and mitigating systemic vehicular congestion. Aiming to elevate the precision of short-term traffic flow prediction, this paper first addresses the low precision of the Dung Beetle Optimizer (DBO) algorithm by introducing an exponential adaptive weight in the way of position update for the ball-rolling dung beetle, along with incorporating a Cauchy–Gaussian mutation strategy. We propose the Multi-strategy improved Dung Beetle Optimizer (MDBO), which is validated using eight benchmark test functions, demonstrating that MDBO outperforms common optimization algorithms in solution accuracy. Secondly, we adopt a combined prediction model, Traffic Flow Temporal-Spatio Network (TFTSNet), which constructs spatial feature modules and temporal feature modules in parallel fusion. Finally, we achieve short-term traffic flow prediction by optimizing the TFTSNet combined prediction model using MDBO. The experiment evaluated model performance using publicly available traffic flow datasets. The results demonstrate that, compared to other state-of-the-art models, the proposed joint prediction model based on MDBO-optimized TFTSNet achieves substantial enhancements in both prediction precision and generalization capability. Root mean square error (RMSE) decreased by 8.7–35.7%, mean absolute error (MAE) decreased by 6.6–40.0%, and R² reached 0.975, showcasing robust predictive capabilities and engineering reference value.