WBMCF: Robust Spatiotemporal Forecasting of Terrorism Fatalities with Multi-Scale Time–Frequency Fusion

Abstract

Reliable forecasting of cross-regional terrorism fatalities is essential for early warning and security planning. However, real-world terrorism data are characterized by extreme sparsity, abrupt volatility, and weak, rapidly shifting non-Euclidean spatial relationships, posing substantial challenges for existing spatiotemporal forecasting models in learning stable multi-scale dependencies. To address these challenges, we propose a robust spatiotemporal forecasting framework, termed WBMCF. In the temporal dimension, a single-level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is introduced to stabilize temporal structures, and a Bidirectional Gated Mamba module is employed to capture stage-dependent long-range temporal dependencies; additionally, in the spatial dimension, a topology-agnostic Convolutional Feed-Forwar+d Network (ConvFFN) is incorporated to model cross-regional dependencies via implicit feature coupling, thereby eliminating reliance on fixed spatial topologies. Extensive experiments on five regional subsets of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) demonstrate that WBMCF achieves stable and competitive forecasting performance under sparse and noisy conditions. The source code is available at https://github.com/weibaozhong/WBMCF.