A Hybrid-Feature-Based Autoencoder Model for Predicting Traffic Flow to Accelerate Ambulance Medical Response Time in Internet of Vehicles

Traffic congestion during ambulance travel can delay medical response times. With the growing availability of traffic data, computational methods for traffic flow prediction are attracting significant attention. However, current computational prediction models have the following shortcomings. Fully connected networks require extensive feature engineering yet struggle to capture local traffic flow features. Their high parameter count increases training time and overfitting risk, while varying traffic conditions hinder model generalization. Therefore, in this work, we propose a hybrid-feature-based autoencoder (HFAE) model to predict traffic flow and accelerate ambulance medical response time in Internet of Vehicles. Specifically, the HFAE model simultaneously considers local features from the convolutional neural network and global features from the fully connected neural network. Additionally, the HFAE model uses an autoencoder to reconstruct the original input, capturing the intrinsic structure of the traffic flow data. Specifically, the root mean-squared error and mean absolute error scores of the HFAE model are better than those of the three mainstream models.