Machine Learning Models for Traffic Prediction on Arterial Roads Using Traffic Features and Weather Information

This study addresses the challenges of predicting traffic flow on arterial roads where dynamic behaviours such as passenger pick-ups, vehicle turns, and parking interruptions complicate forecasting. The research develops and evaluates unidirectional and bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models using a dataset of 70,072 observations collected over 12 months from Hoddle Street in Melbourne, Australia. The models were trained to predict traffic speeds and volumes up to 60 min ahead. The results indicated that the BiLSTM model significantly outperformed unidirectional LSTM, achieving over 99% accuracy for speed predictions and over 96% for volume predictions. The research also tested the impacts of incorporating weather variables such as rainfall, temperature, humidity, and wind speed on model performance, which was found to provide small improvements. Traffic flow prediction accuracy increased from 97.5% to 97.6% for 30-min horizons, and from 96.9% to 97.6% for 60-min horizons. Although the inclusion of weather data only marginally enhanced prediction performance, its inclusion has practical implications for public awareness of travel impacts under severe weather. The findings in this study highlight the effectiveness of deep learning techniques for traffic forecasting on arterial roads, establishing a foundation for future research in this area.