STHMoE: Hypergraph-Enhanced Heterogeneous Dependency Coordination for LLM-Based Urban Traffic Data Forecasting

Abstract

Spatio-temporal traffic forecasting is a fundamental big data analytics task for intelligent transportation systems, where massive urban sensor streams exhibit heterogeneous, non-stationary, and structurally dynamic patterns. Although recent deep learning and large language model (LLM)-based methods have advanced traffic forecasting, they often remain temporally centered and lack effective coordination of temporal, spectral, pairwise spatial, and higher-order structural cues under evolving traffic regimes. To address this heterogeneous dependency coordination problem, we propose STHMoE, a Spatio-Temporal Hypergraph-Enhanced Mixture of Experts framework for urban traffic data forecasting. STHMoE decouples traffic dynamics into frequency-domain, time-domain, spatio-domain, and higher-order spatial representations, which are modeled by prompt-guided heterogeneous experts built upon a partially frozen LLM backbone. The first three experts leverage domain-specific statistical prompts, while the higher-order spatio expert uses a structural placeholder prompt and obtains dependency information from an adaptive hypergraph module. To capture evolving spatial structures in traffic data,, STHMoE jointly learns first-order graph dependencies and higher-order group interactions without predefined topologies. An entropy-aware MoE router with coefficient-of-variation load balancing adaptively fuses expert outputs while improving expert utilization and routing confidence. Experiments on 10 real-world traffic benchmarks show that STHMoE achieves competitive performance against temporal, spatio-temporal graph, and LLM-based baselines.