Traffic flow prediction model based on deep belief network and genetic algorithm

Abstract

Traffic flow prediction plays an indispensable role in the intelligent transportation system. The effectiveness of traffic control and management relies heavily on the prediction accuracy. The authors propose a model based on deep belief networks (DBNs) to predict the traffic flow. Moreover, they use Fletcher–Reeves conjugate gradient algorithm to optimise the fine-tuning of model's parameters. Since the traffic flow has various features at different times such as weekday, weekend, daytime and night-time, the hyper-parameters of the model should adapt to the time. Therefore, they employ the genetic algorithm to find the optimal hyper-parameters of DBN models for different times. The dataset from Caltrans Performance Measurement System was used to evaluate the performance of their models. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieved better performance in different times.