Long Short Term Memory Based Traffic Prediction Using Multi-Source Data

Abstract Traffic prediction is a task where the goal is to determine the number and type of vehicles, or some other traffic related metric, at certain time point. In addition to predicting the short-term evolution of traffic, prediction can be done for estimating traffic for distant future based on the trends found in historical traffic data, which is a critical component of traffic simulators being able to spawn realistic number of vehicles under prevailing situation. Such prediction system needs to be dependent on the characteristics of the situation and not the preceding traffic flow. This work presents a deep learning based prediction pipeline that uses a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network to map temporal, weather and traffic accident data accurately into traffic flow to predict traffic flow over multiple timesteps from various non-traffic inputs. Traffic data can then be produced based on independent data like weather forecasts and be used for other applications. As far as we know, no previous traffic predictor combines so many input variables to predict traffic flow with vehicle type information. To make the event based traffic accident dataset compatible with time series data, a novel preprocessing step based on power law decay phenomenon is added. Quantitative experiments show that the proposed preprocessing step and optimized hyperparameters improve the accuracy of the predictor on multiple metrics compared to a model without accident information. In two established statistical evaluation metrics, Mean Absolute Error and Mean Squared Error, the improvement was over $$20 \%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>20</mml:mn> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> for certain vehicle types.