Traffic flow prediction based on GRU-BP combined neural network

The increasing complexity of urban transportation systems and the growing volume of vehicles have made traffic congestion a persistent challenge in modern cities. Efficient traffic flow prediction is essential for mitigating congestion, improving road safety, optimizing traffic signal control, and enhancing overall transportation efficiency. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative tool in the field of traffic management, offering sophisticated algorithms capable of modeling, analyzing, and predicting complex traffic patterns with high accuracy. The application of AI in traffic flow prediction leverages vast amounts of real-time and historical data to generate precise forecasts, supporting data-driven decision-making by urban planners and traffic control authorities. The prediction of traffic flow involves analyzing time-series data that exhibit nonlinear, dynamic, and often stochastic behavior. Traditional statistical models, such as autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), have proven to be limited in handling the high dimensionality and variability inherent in traffic systems. In contrast, AI algorithms possess the capacity to learn and adapt from complex data inputs without the need for explicit programming, making them particularly suitable for traffic-related applications. AI algorithms used in traffic flow prediction can be broadly categorized into machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches. Machine learning algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machines (SVM), decision trees, and random forests have demonstrated effectiveness in short-term traffic prediction tasks. These algorithms are capable of identifying hidden patterns in traffic data and adjusting to changes in traffic behavior over time. Ensemble methods, which combine the strengths of multiple learning models, further enhance prediction accuracy and robustness. Deep learning algorithms, a subfield of AI inspired by the human brain’s neural architecture, have shown exceptional performance in capturing spatial-temporal dependencies in traffic data. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), particularly long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and gated recurrent units (GRUs), are widely used for their ability to process sequential data and retain information over extended time intervals. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are employed to extract spatial features from traffic sensor data or road network imagery. Hybrid models that integrate CNNs with RNNs have achieved high levels of predictive precision by simultaneously learning spatial and temporal correlations. In addition to supervised learning methods, unsupervised and reinforcement learning techniques are also applied in traffic flow prediction. Clustering algorithms, such as k-means and DBSCAN, assist in identifying traffic patterns, while reinforcement learning models optimize adaptive traffic signal control systems by learning optimal actions through environmental interaction. This study explores the different types of AI algorithms used in traffic flow prediction, examining their theoretical foundations, structural differences, and practical applications. It aims to evaluate the comparative advantages of various algorithms in addressing the challenges of real-time traffic prediction in increasingly complex transportation networks.

Accurate traffic flow prediction is crucial for improving transportation efficiency. To improve the accuracy of traffic flow prediction, we developed a traffic flow prediction framework—namely, traffic flow multicomponent network—that appropriately processes the noise, volatility, and nonlinearity in traffic flow data. This framework comprises three components: a factor selection component, traffic flow decomposition component, and traffic flow prediction component. The factor selection component considers the dynamic effects of weather‐related, environmental, and spatiotemporal factors on traffic flow; it then extracts and analyzes factors exhibiting strong correlations with traffic flow. The traffic flow decomposition component optimizes the parameters of variational mode decomposition on the basis of the envelope entropy by using the sparrow search algorithm; it then transforms traffic flow into multiple intrinsic mode functions to enable accurate traffic flow prediction. Finally, the traffic flow prediction component constructs dynamic feature matrices by using a bidirectional gated recurrent unit model to identify relationships within the data. Moreover, it uses an attention mechanism to assign different weights to different features on the basis of the importance of these features to traffic flow prediction, thereby enabling the efficient processing of a large volume of data. The performance of the proposed framework was examined in experiments conducted on large volumes of traffic flow data with different time granularities. The results indicated that the proposed framework achieved high prediction accuracy and stability for various time granularities, data samples, dataset sizes, and noise conditions. Moreover, it generally outperformed existing traffic flow prediction models under all experimental conditions.

With rapid economic growth and urbanization, the accelerated increase in car ownership has brought massive pressure on urban traffic, and accurate traffic flow prediction information can provide an important basis for urban traffic dynamic planning. The existing methods have problems such as low efficiency, large error, and inability to adapt to short‐term traffic changes. To solve the above problems, the CEEMDAN‐SE‐GWO‐LSTM method was proposed in this paper. First, the traffic flow data is processed for outliers and missing values. The Complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) method is used to decompose the traffic flow data, and sample entropy (SE) is used to reconstruct the subsequence, which is used to improve the quality of the input data. Then, the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) is used to optimize the parameters of the long‐short‐term memory (LSTM) in order to improve the prediction accuracy and prevent the model from falling into a local optimum. Three models are used to compare with the ensemble model proposed in this paper, including back propagation neural network (BPNN), LSTM, and long‐short‐term memory optimized by Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO‐LSTM). Root mean square error (RMSE) is reduced by 40.9% to 66.7%; R2 score is improved by 1.5% to 7.1%. The experimental results show that CEEMDAN‐SE‐GWO‐LSTM has a higher prediction accuracy than the existing traffic flow prediction models. Finally, this paper uses the model prediction error to establish an interval prediction model based on the kernel density estimation theory, which enhances the generalization of the model and the practical application value.

Short-term traffic flow prediction plays an important role in intelligent transportation system. Numerous researchers have paid much attention to it in the past decades. However, the performance of traditional traffic flow prediction methods is not satisfactory, for those methods cannot describe the complicated nonlinearity and uncertainty of the traffic flow precisely. Neural networks were used to deal with the issues, but most of them failed to capture the deep features of traffic flow and be sensitive enough to the time-aware traffic flow data. In this paper, we propose a deep bi-directional long short-term memory (DBL) model by introducing long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network, residual connections, deeply hierarchical networks and bi-directional traffic flow. The proposed model is able to capture the deep features of traffic flow and take full advantage of time-aware traffic flow data. Additionally, we introduce the DBL model, regression layer and dropout training method into a traffic flow prediction architecture. We evaluate the prediction architecture on the dataset from Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model for short-term traffic flow prediction obtains high accuracy and generalizes well compared with other models.

As a cornerstone of intelligent transportation systems, traffic flow prediction has garnered extensive research attention. However, traffic flow data exhibits pronounced spatio-temporal dynamics, rendering accurate traffic flow prediction a challenging endeavor. Existing methodologies compartmentalize the capture of temporal and spatial dependencies through distinct modules, overlooking latent spatio-temporal heterogeneity within traffic data. Furthermore, they often solely consider spatio-temporal correlations between adjacent historical time steps, neglecting the extraction of temporal dependencies across different time intervals. To address these issues, we propose a novel Multi-scale Fusion Dynamic Graph Neural Network (MFDGNN). MFDGNN employs Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) to generate time series on multiple scales, subsequently extracting spatio-temporal features from these sequences to construct mutually independent fusion graphs. By leveraging fusion graphs to extract features from time series on multiple scales, our model adeptly captures spatio-temporal dependencies of traffic nodes across various time dimensions, thereby achieving enhanced precision in traffic flow prediction. Experimental results conducted on four publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model compared to other baseline approaches.

Traffic flow prediction is an important part of intelligent transportation system (ITS). Accurate traffic flow prediction information can provide reliable reference for traffic management decision-makers, effectively reduce traffic congestion, reduce vehicle exhaust pollution, save energy and facilitate the travel of the people. Most of the existing traffic flow prediction models simplify the traffic flow change process into a linear and stable process and ignore the influence of weather conditions on traffic flow, which will lead to large prediction deviation. In order to improve the accuracy of traffic flow prediction, this paper proposes an ensemble learning method based on ET and AdaBoost for fusing traffic and meteorological data under the non-stationary environment to predict the changes of traffic flow. The experiment is based on real traffic and meteorological data, and the results show that the proposed ensemble method is superior to the baseline methods.

With the acceleration of urbanization and the continuous growth of transportation demand, traffic flow prediction has become a key research issue in ITS (Intelligent Transportation System). In this paper, a traffic flow prediction model based on VMD-ARO-BiLSTM is proposed, which can make full use of the spatio-temporal characteristics of traffic data to achieve high-precision traffic flow prediction. First, the traffic flow data are input into VMD (Variational Mode Decomposition) for data reconstruction. Then, the optimal parameter values of BiLSTM (Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory) are solved using ARO (Artificial Rabbits Optimization) to complete the optimization of BiLSTM. Finally, the reconstructed data are input into BiLSTM to realize the accurate prediction of traffic flow. To verify the model performance, we conducted experiments using traffic flow data from different time periods. The experimental results show that on weekdays, the combined VMD-ARO-BiLSTM prediction model decreases the RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) by 47.2% and the MAE (Mean Absolute Error) by 44.6% compared to BiLSTM; on weekends, compared to BiLSTM, the RMSE decreases by 26.1% and MAE decreases by 23.4%, reflecting the strong robustness and applicability of this model, which has certain application value.

As one of the most widely used applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent transportation system (ITS) is of great significance for urban traffic planning, traffic control, and traffic guidance. However, widespread traffic congestion occurs with the increased number of vehicles. The traffic flow prediction is a good idea for traffic congestion. Therefore, many schemes have been proposed for accurate and real-time traffic flow prediction, but there still exist many issues, including low accuracy, weak adaptability and inferior real-time. Meanwhile, the complex spatial and temporal dependencies in traffic flow are still challenging. To address the above issues, we propose a novel spatial-temporal Chebyshev graph neural network model (ST-ChebNet) for traffic flow prediction to capture the spatial-temporal features, which can ensure accurate traffic flow prediction. Concretely, we first add a fully connected layer to fuse the features of traffic data into a new feature to generate a matrix, and then the long short-term memory (LSTM) model is adopted to learn traffic state changes for capturing the temporal dependencies. Then, we use the Chebyshev graph neural network (ChebNet) to learn the complex topological structures in the traffic network for capturing the spatial dependencies. Eventually, the spatial features and the temporal features are fused to guarantee the traffic flow prediction. The experiments show that ST-ChebNet can make accurate and real-time traffic flow prediction compared with other eight baseline methods on real-world traffic data sets PeMS.

Traffic flow prediction provides support for travel management, vehicle scheduling, and intelligent transportation system construction. In this work, a graph space–time network (GSTNCNI), incorporating complex network feature information, is proposed to predict future highway traffic flow time series. Firstly, a traffic complex network model using traffic big data is established, the topological features of traffic road networks are then analyzed using complex network theory, and finally, the topological features are combined with graph neural networks to explore the roles played by the topological features of 97 traffic network nodes. Consequently, six complex network properties are discussed, namely, degree centrality, clustering coefficient, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, point intensity, and shortest average path length. This study improves the graph convolutional neural network based on the above six complex network properties and proposes a graph spatial–temporal network consisting of a combination of several complex network properties. By comparison with existing baselines containing graph convolutional neural networks, it is verified that GSTNCNI possesses high traffic flow prediction accuracy and robustness. In addition, ablation experiments are conducted for six different complex network features to verify the effect of different complex network features on the model’s prediction accuracy. Experimental analysis indicates that the model with combined multiple complex network features has a higher prediction accuracy, and its performance is improved by 31.46% on average, compared with the model containing only one complex network feature.

The forecasting of traffic flow is an important part of intelligent transportation system; actual and accurate forecasting of traffic flow can give scientific support for urban traffic guidance and control. As there is big forecast error when modeling toward traffic flow data with discrete grey model DGM (1, 1), this paper amends the equal interval time sequence. According to the characteristic of time coefficient and backpropagation (BP) neural network, we propose an improved grey model by combining DGM (1, 1) model with BP neural network model. The experimental result indicates that the improved grey model is scientific and effective for the forecasting of traffic flow.

With the acceleration of urbanization and the continuous growth of traffic flow, accurate prediction of highway traffic flow has become a key demand for optimizing traffic management and alleviating congestion. Traditional prediction methods are often inefficient in dealing with complex traffic patterns, while deep learning technology brings new solutions for traffic flow prediction with its powerful feature learning and pattern recognition capabilities. This paper reviews deep learning applications' current state and future trends in highway traffic flow prediction. It introduces deep learning technology and its advantages in traffic flow prediction. The paper then analyzes the specific applications of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and their variants in data processing, feature extraction, and prediction performance. The challenges currently faced, such as data preprocessing and the capture of long-term dependencies, are also discussed, along with proposed solutions. Finally, the paper looks forward to the future development of deep learning in the field of traffic flow prediction, highlighting its importance in improving traffic management efficiency.

Short-term traffic flow prediction can provide a basis for traffic management and support for travelers to make decisions. Accurate short-term traffic flow prediction also provides necessary conditions for the sustainable development of the traffic environment. Although the application of deep learning methods for traffic flow prediction has achieved good accuracy, the problem of combining multiple deep learning methods to improve the prediction accuracy of a single method still has a margin for in-depth research. In this article, a combined deep learning prediction (CDLP) model including two paralleled single deep learning models, CNN-LSTM-attention model and CNN-GRU-attention model, is established. In the model, a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN) is used to extract traffic flow local trend features and RNN variants (LSTM and GRU) with attention mechanism are used to extract long temporal dependencies trend features. Moreover, a dynamic optimal weighted coefficient algorithm (DOWCA) is proposed to calculate the dynamic weights of CNN-LSTM-attention and CNN-GRU-attention with the goal of minimizing the sum of squared errors of the CDLP model. Then, the neuron number, loss function, optimization algorithm, and other parameters of the CDLP model are discussed and set through experiments. Finally, the training set and test set for the CDLP model are established through the processing of traffic flow data collected from the field. The CDLP model is trained and tested, and the prediction results of traffic flow are obtained and analyzed. It indicates that the CDLP model can fit the change trend of traffic flow very well and has better performance. Furthermore, under the same dataset, the results from the CDLP model are compared with baseline models. It is found that the CDLP model has higher prediction accuracy than baseline models.

A Single traffic flow prediction method has weak applicability for short-time traffic flow prediction. In order to adapt to the needs for traffic guidance and signal control, a short-time traffic flow RBF neural network model combination prediction method based on wavelet de-nosing processing is put forward. First, the traffic flow data are decomposed and reconstructed by using the wavelet transform technique. Then Under the intensive analysis the characteristics of short-time traffic flow, the low frequency outline signal and high frequency detail signal are fitted respectively by using two different RBF neural network models, and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed to train RBF neural network. The confirmation analysis is carried on with traffic flow data from typical roads in some city urban districts. The results show that the precision of combination prediction method is significantly improved.

Analysis of traffic flow signals plays an important role in traffic prediction and management. As an intrinsic property, the singular point of a traffic flow signal labels a new nonsteady status. Therefore, detecting the singular point is an effective approach to determine the moment of traffic flow prediction. In this paper, an improved wavelet transform is proposed to detect singular points of real-time traffic flow signals. The number of detected singular points is output via the heuristic selection of multiple scales. Then, a weighted similarity measurement of historical traffic flow signals is utilized to predict the next singular point. The position of the next singular point decides the duration of prediction adaptively. The detected and predicted singular points are applied to dynamically update the unequal interval prediction of traffic flow. Furthermore, a Vasicek model is used to predict the traffic flow by minimizing the sum of the relative mean standard error (RMSE) between the traffic flow increment in the predicted interval and the sampled increments of previous intervals. A decomposition method is used to solve the unequal matrix problem. Based on the scenario and traffic flow imported from the real-world map, the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing approaches with high prediction accuracy and much lower computing cost.

The short-term traffic flow prediction and modeling of highways are the core content and important foundation of highway management decision-making support systems. It is of great significance to improving the level of highway management. Based on the macrodynamic traffic flow model, this article establishes a method for establishing a highway traffic flow prediction model based on the BP neural network theory and gray theory. We collected and carry out modeling and prediction of highway traffic flow data near a certain station. It is learned from the prediction results that the traffic flow prediction model based on the BP neural network and gray theory has a high degree of reliability.