A Hybrid Stacked Traffic Volume Prediction Approach for a Sparse Road Network

Abstract

How to provide accurate and timely traffic flow information has become a hot topic in recent years since they can help schedule trips better and reduce traffic congestion. In previous studies, some machine learning (ML)-based models were proposed to predict the traffic volume at a single road segment/position, and these models performed not bad. However, when applied in a more complicated road network, they show low efficiency or need to pay higher computing costs. To solve this problem, an innovative ML-based model named selected stacked gated recurrent units model (SSGRU), is proposed for predicting the traffic flow through a sparse road network in this paper. There are mainly two parts in this model, one is used to do spatial pattern mining based on linear regression coefficients, and the other one includes a stacked gated recurrent unit (SGRU) which is essential for multi-road traffic flow prediction. A binarytree is adopted to approximate the sparse road network in the suburban area. To evaluate the proposed model, seven different traffic volume data sets recorded at 15-min interval are chosen from the England Highways data set to test our proposed work. The result shows that our model has greater adaptability and higher accuracy than others when applied to a multi-road input infrastructure.