Cold-Start Traffic State Forecasting at Unseen Sensor Locations via Support-Conditioned Meta-Graph Learning

Abstract

Traffic sensors provide real-time measurements of current traffic conditions, whereas traffic management applications require forecasts of future traffic speed or flow. This study considers the incremental expansion of an operating sensor network, in which a pre-trained network-level forecasting model must predict traffic states at sensor locations that were absent during training. Many spatio-temporal graph neural networks rely on sensor-specific embeddings and graph connections learned from data-rich training networks. These representations are undefined for previously unseen locations, limiting the direct application of pre-trained adaptive-graph forecasters during sensor-network expansion. To address this cold-start problem, we propose support-conditioned sensor-adaptive meta-graph learning (SC-SAMG), which derives target-node representations and spatial dependencies from a short support period. The framework combines a support-set encoder, a task-specific graph learner, and first-order meta-learning to adapt the network-level forecaster using one to seven days of target observations. Experiments on four traffic benchmarks evaluate forecasts of speed or flow over the next 15–60 min under a leakage-controlled held-out-node protocol. SC-SAMG consistently outperforms fine-tuned gated recurrent unit (GRU), adaptive graph convolutional recurrent network (AGCRN), and diffusion convolutional recurrent neural network (DCRNN) baselines. It reduces mean absolute error (MAE) by up to 11% relative to the adaptive-graph baseline and by up to 7% relative to the diffusion convolutional baseline. These results demonstrate the potential of support-conditioned graph adaptation for incorporating previously unseen sensor locations into existing network-level traffic forecasting systems.