AbstractAn intelligent transport system (ITS) is fully valuable only if it can dynamically and aptly integrate all the latest cutting‐edge technologies. An ITS focuses on providing services like promptly offering real‐time road traffic information to interested parties, finding ways to reduce the average waiting time and offer secure and reliable services for commuters using past statistics. Short‐term traffic prediction is one such area in which the research community has focused in the past decade. Existing models developed for prediction has scope to improve in terms of accuracy and training time. There is a necessity to develop a best‐performing model that is computationally affluent to train with the optimal hyperparameter configuration as input which leads to improved performance. This article proposes a model that captures the traffic flow trend present in the past data to predict the flow for a future time interval. This model is an amalgamation of seasonal global trend (SGT) model and long short‐term memory (LSTM) model with attention mechanism. A novel hyperparameter tuning algorithm is also proposed which is based on multi‐armed bandit strategy with context, incorporating the right trade‐off between exploitation and exploration of the hyperparameter space using successive halving. Experimental results conducted proves that our forecast model in combination with the proposed hyperparameter tuning algorithm outperforms the existing models like SGT, LSTM models in terms of accuracy and time.