Less is More: Strategic Expert Selection Outperforms Ensemble Complexity in Traffic Forecasting

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Guettala, Walid, Zhao, Yufan, Gulyás, László
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Guettala, Walid
Zhao, Yufan
Gulyás, László
author_facet Guettala, Walid
Zhao, Yufan
Gulyás, László
contents Traffic forecasting is fundamental to intelligent transportation systems, enabling congestion mitigation and emission reduction in increasingly complex urban environments. While recent graph neural network approaches have advanced spatial temporal modeling, existing mixture of experts frameworks like Time Enhanced Spatio Temporal Attention Model (TESTAM) lack explicit incorporation of physical road network topology, limiting their spatial capabilities. We present TESTAM+, an enhanced spatio temporal forecasting framework that introduces a novel SpatioSemantic Expert integrating physical road topology with data driven feature similarity through hybrid graph construction. TESTAM+ achieves significant improvements over TESTAM: 1.3% MAE reduction on METR LA (3.10 vs. 3.14) and 4.1% improvement on PEMS BAY (1.65 vs. 1.72). Through comprehensive ablation studies, we discover that strategic expert selection fundamentally outperforms naive ensemble aggregation. Individual experts demonstrate remarkable effectiveness: the Adaptive Expert achieves 1.63 MAE on PEMS BAY, outperforming the original three expert TESTAM (1.72 MAE), while the SpatioSemantic Expert matches this performance with identical 1.63 MAE. The optimal Identity + Adaptive configuration achieves an 11.5% MAE reduction compared to state of the art MegaCRN on METR LA (2.99 vs. 3.38), while reducing inference latency by 53.1% compared to the full four expert TESTAM+. Our findings reveal that fewer, strategically designed experts outperform complex multi expert ensembles, establishing new state of the art performance with superior computational efficiency for real time deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07426
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Less is More: Strategic Expert Selection Outperforms Ensemble Complexity in Traffic Forecasting
Guettala, Walid
Zhao, Yufan
Gulyás, László
Artificial Intelligence
68T07, 68T05, 62M10, 90B20
I.2.6; I.5.4
Traffic forecasting is fundamental to intelligent transportation systems, enabling congestion mitigation and emission reduction in increasingly complex urban environments. While recent graph neural network approaches have advanced spatial temporal modeling, existing mixture of experts frameworks like Time Enhanced Spatio Temporal Attention Model (TESTAM) lack explicit incorporation of physical road network topology, limiting their spatial capabilities. We present TESTAM+, an enhanced spatio temporal forecasting framework that introduces a novel SpatioSemantic Expert integrating physical road topology with data driven feature similarity through hybrid graph construction. TESTAM+ achieves significant improvements over TESTAM: 1.3% MAE reduction on METR LA (3.10 vs. 3.14) and 4.1% improvement on PEMS BAY (1.65 vs. 1.72). Through comprehensive ablation studies, we discover that strategic expert selection fundamentally outperforms naive ensemble aggregation. Individual experts demonstrate remarkable effectiveness: the Adaptive Expert achieves 1.63 MAE on PEMS BAY, outperforming the original three expert TESTAM (1.72 MAE), while the SpatioSemantic Expert matches this performance with identical 1.63 MAE. The optimal Identity + Adaptive configuration achieves an 11.5% MAE reduction compared to state of the art MegaCRN on METR LA (2.99 vs. 3.38), while reducing inference latency by 53.1% compared to the full four expert TESTAM+. Our findings reveal that fewer, strategically designed experts outperform complex multi expert ensembles, establishing new state of the art performance with superior computational efficiency for real time deployment.
title Less is More: Strategic Expert Selection Outperforms Ensemble Complexity in Traffic Forecasting
topic Artificial Intelligence
68T07, 68T05, 62M10, 90B20
I.2.6; I.5.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07426