SqLinear: Balanced Square Partitioning Makes Linear Interaction Sufficient for Large-Scale Traffic Forecasting

Traffic prediction is a core task in intelligent transportation systems and urban-scale decision making. Despite the effectiveness of mainstream neural network-based methods, their deployment in real-world settings with thousands of traffic sensors is severely jeopardized by their poor computational scalability. To address this, the community has attempted to incorporate spatial database partitioning techniques to improve model scalability. However, these approaches rely on handcrafted geometric heuristics and often produce irregular or imbalanced data partitions, leading to boundary fragmentation, excessive padding overheads, and degraded model accuracy. In this paper, we propose SqLinear, an efficient and effective architecture for large-scale traffic prediction. First, we design Square Partition, a geometry-adaptive algorithm that partitions massive traffic sensors into balanced, non-overlapping, and compact spatial regions. Unlike existing heuristic-based designs, Square Partition is theoretically grounded and provides provable guarantees on partition utilization and split balance, establishing a high-quality foundation for downstream spatio-temporal modeling. Next, we propose a Hierarchical Linear Interaction (HLI) module that abandons the costly attention mechanisms commonly used in Transformer-based spatio-temporal models. HLI efficiently propagates global inter-region dependencies and refines them at the node level through a lightweight linear interaction scheme, enabling effective spatio-temporal modeling with linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments on four large-scale traffic datasets and 11 baselines show that SqLinear reduces MAE by 2.30% on average under the standard setting and by up to 6.78% under extreme scalability settings, while reducing training runtime by 13.27%--30.84% in spatial- and horizon-scaling scenarios.

IOAH3: Importance-Driven Adaptive Spatial Partitioning

We present IOAH3 (Importance-Oriented Adaptive H3 partitioning), a computational method for constructing data-driven spatial partitions of geo-referenced observation domains. Standard approaches to spatial aggregation adopt fixed areal units, such as administrative boundaries or uniform hexagonal grids at a single resolution, without regard to the informational content of the underlying observations in each region. This leads to the well-known modifiable areal unit problem: statistical and inferential results depend on the arbitrary choice of partition, and spatially concentrated phenomena are averaged out in coarse cells that obscure fine-scale structure. IOAH3 addresses this by constructing an adaptive partition in three stages: multi-source feature extraction and importance scoring via principal component analysis over road density, POI density, building density, and terrain roughness signals, with population and flood-hazard data entering as auxiliary inputs to cell filtering and spatial smoothness; spatial cell selection via Markov Random Field graph-cut optimisation, which jointly maximises per-cell importance while enforcing spatial contiguity; and data-driven hierarchical refinement of high-importance regions to finer H3 resolution levels, with neighbour-propagated support to avoid isolated fine-resolution islands. The resulting partitions serve as input to spatial inference pipelines and provide a principled resolution of the partition-sensitivity problem prior to any modelling step.