Hybrid short-term freeway speed prediction methods based on periodic analysis

Abstract

Short-term traffic speed forecasting is an important issue for developing Intelligent Transportation Systems applications. So far, a number of short-term speed prediction approaches have been developed. Recently, some multivariate approaches have been proposed to consider the spatial and temporal correlation of traffic data. However, as traffic data often demonstrates periodic patterns, the existing methodologies often fail to take into account spatial and temporal information as well as the periodic features of traffic data simultaneously in the multi-step prediction. This paper comprehensively evaluated the multi-step prediction performance of space time (ST) model, vector autoregression (VAR), and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models using the 5 minute freeway speed data collected from five loop detectors located on an eastbound segment of Interstate 394 freeway, in Minnesota. To further consider the cyclical characteristics of freeway speed data, hybrid prediction approaches were proposed to decompose speed into two different components: a periodic trend and a residual part. A trigonometric regression function is introduced to capture the periodic component and the residual part is modeled by the ST, VAR, and ARIMA models. The prediction results suggest that for multi-step freeway speed prediction, as the time step increases, the ST model demonstrates advantages over the VAR and ARIMA models. Comparisons among the ST, VAR, ARIMA, and hybrid models demonstrated that modeling the periodicity and the residual part separately can better interpret the underlining structure of the speed data. The proposed hybrid prediction approach can accommodate the periodic trends and provide more accurate prediction results when the forecasting horizon is greater than 30 min.