ModWaveMLP: MLP-Based Mode Decomposition and Wavelet Denoising Model to Defeat Complex Structures in Traffic Forecasting

Traffic prediction is the core issue of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Recently, researchers have tended to use complex structures, such as transformer-based structures, for tasks such as traffic prediction. Notably, traffic data is simpler to process compared to text and images, which raises questions about the necessity of these structures. Additionally, when handling traffic data, researchers tend to manually design the model structure based on the data features, which makes the structure of traffic prediction redundant and the model generalizability limited. To address the above, we introduce the ‘ModWaveMLP’—A multilayer perceptron (MLP) based model designed according to mode decomposition and wavelet noise reduction information learning concepts. The model is based on simple MLP structure, which achieves the separation and prediction of different traffic modes and does not depend on additional features introduced such as the topology of the traffic network. By performing experiments on real-world datasets METR-LA and PEMS-BAY, our model achieves SOTA, outperforms GNN and transformer-based models, and outperforms those that introduce additional feature data with better generalizability, and we further demonstrate the effectiveness of the various parts of the model through ablation experiments. This offers new insights to subsequent researchers involved in traffic model design. The code is available at: https://github.com/Kqingzheng/ModWaveMLP.