PIMCST: Physics-Informed Multi-Phase Consensus and Spatio-Temporal Few-Shot Learning for Traffic Flow Forecasting

TL;DR

This paper introduces MCPST, a novel framework for few-shot traffic flow forecasting that models complex spatio-temporal dynamics, enabling rapid adaptation to new cities with limited data and outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a multi-phase consensus spatio-temporal framework with adaptive fusion and meta-learning for effective few-shot traffic prediction across domains.

Findings

Outperforms 14 state-of-the-art methods on four datasets

Provides theoretical guarantees including approximation and generalisation bounds

Reduces data requirements while maintaining high prediction accuracy

Abstract

Accurate traffic flow prediction remains a fundamental challenge in intelligent transportation systems, particularly in cross-domain, data-scarce scenarios where limited historical data hinders model training and generalisation. The complex spatio-temporal dependencies and nonlinear dynamics of urban mobility networks further complicate few-shot learning across different cities. This paper proposes MCPST, a novel Multi-phase Consensus Spatio-Temporal framework for few-shot traffic forecasting that reconceptualises traffic prediction as a multi-phase consensus learning problem. Our framework introduces three core innovations: (1) a multi-phase engine that models traffic dynamics through diffusion, synchronisation, and spectral embeddings for comprehensive dynamic characterisation; (2) an adaptive consensus mechanism that dynamically fuses phase-specific predictions while enforcing consistency; and (3) a structured meta-learning strategy for rapid adaptation to new cities with minimal data. We establish extensive theoretical guarantees, including representation theorems with bounded approximation errors and generalisation bounds for few-shot adaptation. Through experiments on four real-world datasets, MCPST outperforms fourteen state-of-the-art methods in spatio-temporal graph learning methods, dynamic graph transfer learning methods, prompt-based spatio-temporal prediction methods and cross-domain few-shot settings, improving prediction accuracy while reducing required training data and providing interpretable insights. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/afofanah/MCPST.