A Gated-Guided Serial CNN-Transformer Network for High-Speed Railway Traffic Prediction

Accurate traffic forecasting in high-speed railway (HSR) systems is hindered by abrupt signal fluctuations and varied mobility scenarios. Conventional approaches that rely on fixed weighted combinations of local and global features are unable to adjust rapidly to real-time changes, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this limitation, we propose a novel gated guided serial CNN and Transformer network (GsCT) that employs a dynamic combination mechanism implemented via a multilayer perceptron (MLP). In GsCT, CNNs capture fine-grained local variations while Transformers model longrange dependencies, and the adaptive MLP-based gating module adjusts the contribution of each branch based on time-window statistics. This dynamic fusion improves prediction quality by 6.5% compared to conventional fixed weighting mechanisms. Evaluations on both public and real-world HSR datasets demonstrate that GsCT achieves a 2.4% reduction in RMSE relative to LSTM-based methods, and the learned gating coefficients offer transparent interpretability of the feature fusion process. Overall, GsCT provides an effective solution for real-time railway traffic forecasting, paving the way for next-generation HSR services.