Advancing Urban Planning with Deep Learning: Intelligent Traffic Flow Prediction and Optimization for Smart Cities

Traffic flow prediction plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems. To accurately capture the complex non-linear temporal characteristics of traffic flow, this paper adopts a Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) model in traffic flow prediction. Compared to Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), which can memorize information from the previous sequence, this model can memorize the traffic flow information in both previous and subsequent sequence. To demonstrate the model’s performance, a set of real case data at 1-hour intervals from 5 working days was used, wherein the dataset was separated into training and validation. To improve data quality, an augmented dickey-fuller unit root test and differential processing were performed before model training. Four benchmark models were used, including the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), and GRU. The prediction results show the superior performance of Bi-GRU. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of the Bi-GRU model are 30.38, 9.88%, and 23.35, respectively. The prediction accuracy of LSTM, Bi-LSTM, GRU, and Bi-GRU, which belong to deep learning methods, is significantly higher than that of the traditional ARIMA model. The MAPE difference of Bi-GRU and GRU is 0.48% which is a small prediction error value. The results show that the prediction accuracy of the peak period is higher than that of the low peak. The Bi-GRU model has a certain lag on traffic flow prediction.

An efficient management and better scheduling by the power companies are of great significance for accurate electrical load forecasting. There exists a high level of uncertainties in the load time series, which is challenging to make the accurate short-term load forecast (STLF), medium-term load forecast (MTLF), and long-term load forecast (LTLF). To extract the local trends and to capture the same patterns of short, and medium forecasting time series, we proposed long short-term memory (LSTM), Multilayer perceptron, and convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn the relationship in the time series. These models are proposed to improve the forecasting accuracy. The models were tested based on the real-world case by conducting detailed experiments to validate their stability and practicality. The performance was measured in terms of squared error, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). To predict the next 24 hours ahead load forecasting, the lowest prediction error was obtained using LSTM with R2 (0.5160), MLP with MAPE (4.97), MAE (104.33) and RMSE (133.92). To predict the next 72 hours ahead of load forecasting, the lowest prediction error was obtained using LSTM with R2 (0.7153), MPL with MAPE (7.04), MAE (125.92), RMSE (188.33). Likewise, to predict the next one week ahead load forecasting, the lowest error was obtained using CNN with R2 (0.7616), MLP with MAPE (6.162), MAE (103.156), RMSE (150.81). Moreover, to predict the next one-month load forecasting, the lowest prediction error was obtained using CNN with R2 (0.820), MLP with MAPE (5.18), LSTM with MAE (75.12) and RMSE (109.197). The results reveal that proposed methods achieved better and stable performance for predicting the short, and medium-term load forecasting. The findings of the STLF indicate that the proposed model can be better implemented for local system planning and dispatch, while it will be more efficient for MTLF in better scheduling and maintenance operations.

Considering the increased risk of urban flooding and drought due to global climate change and rapid urbanization, the imperative for more accurate methods for streamflow forecasting has intensified. This study introduces a pioneering approach leveraging the available network of real-time monitoring stations and advanced machine learning algorithms that can accurately simulate spatial–temporal problems. The Spatio-Temporal Attention Gated Recurrent Unit (STA-GRU) model is renowned for its computational efficacy in forecasting streamflow events with a forecast horizon of 7 days. The novel integration of the groundwater level, precipitation, and river discharge as predictive variables offers a holistic view of the hydrological cycle, enhancing the model’s accuracy. Our findings reveal that for a 7-day forecasting period, the STA-GRU model demonstrates superior performance, with a notable improvement in mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values and R-square (R2) alongside reductions in the root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) metrics, underscoring the model’s generalizability and reliability. Comparative analysis with seven conventional deep learning models, including the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), the Convolutional Neural Network LSTM (CNNLSTM), the Convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM), the Spatio-Temporal Attention LSTM (STA-LSTM), the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), the Convolutional Neural Network GRU (CNNGRU), and the STA-GRU, confirms the superior predictive power of the STA-LSTM and STA-GRU models when faced with long-term prediction. This research marks a significant shift towards an integrated network of real-time monitoring stations with advanced deep-learning algorithms for streamflow forecasting, emphasizing the importance of spatially and temporally encompassing streamflow variability within an urban watershed’s stream network.

Short time traffic flow forecasting is the heart of matter in intelligent transportation system (ITS). Accurate traffic flow prediction can help people to choose trip mode and trip time. Although gated recurrent unit (GRU) has outstanding performance in traffic flow forecasting, but determines the hyperparameters of the GRU rely by experience reduces the predictive effect of the model. This study uses the adaptive learning strategy improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm to optimize the hyperparameters of GRU model. The characteristics of traffic data with network topology are matched by this algorithm, so the accuracy of traffic flow prediction can be improved. To verify the reliability of this algorithm, this study construct IPSO-GRU model by the traffic flow data from California department of transportation and compare IPSO-GRU model with other traffic flow forecasting models. The experimental results shows that, the IPSO-GRU model achieves the lowest mean square error (MSE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) compared to conventional GRU model.

Predicting future prices of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, presents a formidable challenge owing to their inherent volatility. This study applies Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), a well-established recurrent neural network for time series forecasting, to predict Bitcoin and Ethereum values. Historical price data for both cryptocurrencies, sourced from Yahoo Finance, serves as the basis for analysis. The dataset undergoes an 80% training and 20% testing partition. Subsequently, LSTM models are developed and trained on both datasets. In parallel, the gated recurrent unit (GRU), recognized as an advanced variant of the LSTM model, is explored for comparative purposes. Performance evaluation utilizes fundamental metrics, including root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The results reveal an intriguing trend: both models exhibit superior performance when applied to the Ethereum dataset compared to the Bitcoin dataset. This observation suggests the potential presence of Ethereum-specific features or patterns that align more effectively with deep learning model architectures. Notably, the GRU model consistently outperforms the LSTM model across RMSE, MAE, and MAPE. These outcomes underscore the GRU model’s capacity as a robust tool for cryptocurrency value prediction. In summary, this study tackles the challenge of cryptocurrency price prediction while emphasizing the promising role of advanced neural network architectures, such as GRU, in enhancing prediction accuracy, thus offering valuable insights into financial forecasting.

To more accurately predict short-term traffic flow, this study posits a sophisticated integrated prediction model, CNN-BiGRU-AAM, based on the additive attention mechanism of a convolutional bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural network. This model seeks to enhance the precision of traffic flow prediction by integrating both historical and prospective data. Specifically, the model achieves prediction through two steps: encoding and decoding. In the encoding phase, convolutional neural networks are used to extract spatial correlations between weather and traffic flow in the input sequence, while the BiGRU model captures temporal correlations in the time series. In the decoding phase, an additive attention mechanism is introduced to weigh and fuse the encoded features. The experimental results demonstrate that the CNN-BiGRU model, coupled with the additive attention mechanism, is capable of dynamically capturing the temporal patterns of traffic flow, and the introduction of isolation forests can effectively handle data anomalies and missing values, improving prediction accuracy. Compared to benchmark models such as GRU, the CNN-BiGRU-AAM model shows significant improvement on the test set, with a 47.49 reduction in the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), a 30.72 decrease in the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and a 5.27% reduction in the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The coefficient of determination (R2) reaches 0.97, indicating the high accuracy of the CNN-BiGRU-AAM model in traffic flow prediction. It provides a good solution for short-term traffic flow with spatio-temporal features, thereby enhancing the efficiency of traffic management and planning and promoting the sustainable development of transportation.

Energy is a fundamental human need for several activities. Energy can be impacted by several factors ranging from technical to social and environmental. The impact of COVID-19 outbreak on the energy sector is enormous with serious global socioeconomic disruptions affecting all economic sectors, including tourism, industry, higher education, and the electricity industry. Based on the unstructured data obtained from Eko Electricity Distribution Company this paper proposes three deep learning (DL) models namely: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Simple Recurrent Neural Network (SimpleRNN), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) were used to analyse the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on energy consumption and predict future energy consumption in various district in Lagos, Nigeria. The models were evaluated using the following performance metrics namely: Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). On overall, the lowest MAPE, MAE, RMSE, and MSE of 0.120, 71.073, 93.981, and 8832.466 were obtained for LSTM in Orile, SRNN in Ijora, and GRU in Ijora, respectively. Generally, the GRU performed better in predicting energy consumption in most of the districts of the case study than the LSTM and SimpleRNN. Hence, GRU model can be considered the optimal model for energy consumption prediction in the case study. The importance of having this model is that it can help the government and other stakeholders in economic planning of electricity distribution networks.

The increasing use of cryptocurrencies has changed the dynamics of investment, presenting both opportunities and challenges for investors. Although various studies have compared the performance of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) in predicting financial asset prices, there are still differences in results regarding which model is superior. Therefore, this study aims to compare the performance of LSTM and GRU in predicting Ethereum prices using a hyperparameter tuning approach. The data used is historical data of Ethereum (ETH) shares from 2020 to 2025. The research methodology includes data preprocessing using Min-Max scaling, model development with various layer configurations, and comprehensive evaluation using several performance metrics. The results show that the GRU Model provides superior performance with a lower Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.0234 and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.0168, compared to LSTM's RMSE of 0.0265 and MAE of 0.0193. While LSTM exhibits a slightly better Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 18.08% compared to GRU at 18.17%, the GRU model achieves a higher R² Score of 0.9442 compared to LSTM at 0.9282. Visual analysis of the prediction patterns and residual distributions further demonstrates GRU’s more consistent and accurate performance in capturing Ethereum price movements. These findings suggest that while both models are effective for cryptocurrency price prediction, GRU offers slightly better overall performance and stability, especially in maintaining consistent prediction accuracy across different market conditions.

A modified PSO based hybrid deep learning approach to predict AQI of urban metropolis

New demand-side management models have emerged as a result of rising energy prices, the development of artificial intelligence, and the rise of prosumers. The purpose of this research is to use deep learning techniques to predict the energy production and demand of a prosumer network to determine dynamic prices for the local market. Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) were two methods that were taken into consideration for forecasting consumer demand and wind and solar energy generation. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) were used to compare the various approaches. The results demonstrated that GRU, with 0.0273, 0.0158, and 49.8 in RMSE, MAE, and MAPE respectively, is the best method for predicting energy generation and consumption in our datasets. Demand management system dynamic prices were calculated on an hourly basis using input from energy generation and demand forecasts. Finally, an optimization method was developed for establishing the energy planning.

This paper proposes the application of artificial intelligence to forecast the generation capacity of wind power plants by processing data through noise reduction and filtering. It subsequently employs Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural networks for training, testing, and evaluation. Processing the initial data will help minimize noise and reduce the data space. The study focuses on preprocessing methods and selecting the appropriate neural network between LSTM and GRU. The initial data processing will assess the similarity through the Spearman rank correlation coefficient. The data used in the paper is taken from local wind turbines. The processed data will be input into the neural network for evaluation based on Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Percent Error (PE), and training time. The entire network simulation and evaluation process is performed using MATLAB software. The simulation results show the feasibility and suitability of the GRU network model combined with noise filtering methods, bringing high accuracy and less training time compared to the LSTM network. Specifically, the analysis contrasting the GRU network with the optimized dataset and the LSTM with the unprocessed dataset is more effective than a difference in RMSE of 15.592 and MAPE of 611.047%. Moreover, the time difference between the GRU and LSTM networks with the same dataset has a much earlier time difference from 6 to 28 seconds.

Traffic operation efficiency is greatly impacted by the increase in travel demand and the increase in vehicle ownership. The continued increase in traffic demand has rendered the importance of controlling traffic, especially at intersections. In general, the inefficiency of traffic scheduling leads to traffic congestion, resulting in a rise in fuel consumption, exhaust emissions, and poor quality of service. Various methods for time series forecasting have been proposed for adaptive and remote traffic control. The prediction of traffic has attracted profound attention for improving the reliability and efficiency of traffic flow scheduling while reducing congestion. Therefore, in this work, we studied the problem of the current traffic situation at Muhima Junction one of the busiest junctions in Kigali city. Future traffic rates were forecasted by employing long short-term memory (LSTM) and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models, respectively. Both the models’ performance criteria for adequacy were the mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and root mean squared error (RMSE). The results revealed that LSTM is the best-fitting model for monthly traffic flow prediction. Within this analysis, we proposed an adaptive traffic flow prediction that builds on the features of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication and the Internet of Things (IoT) to control traffic while enhancing the quality of service at the junctions. The real-time actuation of traffic-responsive signal control can be assured when real-time traffic-based signal actuation is reliable.

Geographic heterogeneity of activation functions in urban real-time flood forecasting: Based on seasonal trend decomposition using Loess-Temporal Convolutional Network-Gated Recurrent Unit model

This paper proposes a method based on the clustering algorithm, deep learning, and transfer learning (TL) for short‐term traffic prediction with limited data. To address the challenges posed by limited data and the complex and diverse traffic patterns observed in traffic networks, we propose a profile model based on few‐shot learning to extract each detector's unique profiles. These profiles are then used to cluster detectors with similar patterns into distinct clusters, facilitating effective learning with limited data. A Convolutional Neural Network ‐ Long Short‐Term Memory (CNN‐LSTM)‐based predictive model is proposed to learn and predict traffic volumes for each detector within a cluster. The proposed method demonstrates resilience to detector failures and has been validated using the Performance Measurement System dataset. In scenarios with less than 2 months of training data and 10% failed detectors, the mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) for station‐level traffic volume prediction increase from 12.7 vehs/5 min, 20.9 vehs/5 min, and 10.5% to 13.9 vehs/5 min, 24.2 vehs/5 min, and 11.7%, respectively. For lane‐level traffic volume prediction, the average MAE, RMSE, and MAPE increase from 4.7 vehs/5 min, 7.7 vehs/5 min, and 15% to 5.6 vehs/5 min, 9.6 vehs/5 min, and 16.8%. Furthermore, the proposed method extends its applicability to traffic speed and occupancy prediction tasks. TL is integrated to improve speed/occupancy prediction accuracy by leveraging knowledge obtained from traffic volume, considering the correlation between traffic flow, speed, and occupancy. When less than 1 month of traffic speed/occupancy data is available for learning, the proposed method achieves an MAE, RMSE, and MAPE of 0.7 km/h, 1.3 km/h, and 1.3% for station‐level traffic speed prediction and 0.5%, 1.1%, and 11% for station‐level traffic occupancy.

Cryptocurrency represents a form of asset that has arisen from the progress of financial technology, presenting significant prospects for scholarly investigations. The ability to anticipate cryptocurrency prices with extreme accuracy is very desirable to researchers and investors. However, time-series data presents significant challenges due to the nonlinear nature of the cryptocurrency market, complicating precise price predictions. Several studies have explored cryptocurrency price prediction using various deep learning (DL) algorithms. Three leading cryptocurrencies, determined by market capitalization, Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), and Litecoin (LTC), are examined for exchange rate predictions in this study. Two categories of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), specifically long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU), are employed. Four performance metrics are selected to evaluate the prediction accuracy namely mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and root mean squared error (RMSE) for three cryptocurrencies which demonstrates that GRU model outperforms LSTM. The GRU model was implemented as a two-layer deep learning network, optimized using the Adam optimizer with a dropout rate of 0.2 to prevent overfitting. The model was trained using normalized historical price data sourced from CryptoDataDownload, with an 80:20 train-test split. In this work, GRU qualifies as the best algorithm for developing a cryptocurrency price prediction model. MAPE values for BTC, LTC and ETH are 0.03540, 0.08703 and 0.04415, respectively, which indicate that GRU offers the most accurate forecasts as compared to LSTM. These prediction models are valuable for traders and investors, offering accurate cryptocurrency price predictions. Future studies should also consider additional variables, such as social media trends and trade volumes that may impact cryptocurrency pricing.