An approach is provided for semantic-free traffic prediction. The approach involves dividing a travel-speed data stream into a plurality of travel-speed patterns. The travel-speed data stream represents vehicle travel speeds occurring in a road network. The approach also involves representing each of the plurality of travel-speed patterns by a respective token. The respective token is selected from a dictionary of tokens representing a plurality of travel-speed templates determined from historical travel-speed data. The approach further involves matching a sequence of the respective tokens corresponding to said each of the plurality of travel-speed patterns to a best-fit sequence of tokens determined from the historical travel-speed data. The approach further involves determining a predicted sequence of tokens based on the best-fit sequence of tokens, and generating a traffic prediction for the road network based on the predicted sequence of tokens.