Traffic Flow Prediction Model and Performance Analysis Based on Recurrent Neural Network

Traffic flow has the characteristics of complex spatial dependence and temporal dependence. Deep learning as a traffic flow prediction method can make full use of the temporal and spatial characteristics of traffic flow. In this paper, the road network is abstracted into a graph structure, the size of the graph structure is dynamically changed, and the graph convolutional neural network (GCN) and the long short term memory network (LSTM) are used to capture the temporal and spatial characteristics of traffic flow to solve the traffic flow prediction problem. Based on the data of vehicle speed in California bay area, the experiment is divided into three prediction scales. The effectiveness of the traffic flow prediction model is verified by experimental comparison.

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.

To address the issue of spatiotemporal illusion in short-term traffic flow prediction and deeply explore the underlying short-term traffic flow network characteristics, a traffic flow prediction model that combines long-term spatiotemporal heterogeneity with short-term spatiotemporal features is proposed. In the long-term spatiotemporal branch, the Transformer structure is employed, and a self-supervised masking mechanism is utilized to pretrain the heterogeneity in long-term temporal and spatial dimensions separately. Additionally, a spatiotemporal adaptive module is designed, which adapts to and guides short-term traffic flow prediction across time series and traffic flow networks. In the short-term spatiotemporal branch, a recurrent neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) module is devised. This module is capable of continuously and dynamically adjusting short-term spatiotemporal features, better capturing and exploring potential short-term spatiotemporal characteristics. Through multiple cycles, this module gradually and accurately extracts and compresses road network features, integrates the adapted spatiotemporal heterogeneity, and reconstructs future short-term traffic flows in the decoder. Experiments are conducted on four traffic flow and two traffic speed datasets, showing that compared to traditional time series models, the proposed model’s prediction accuracy indicators have relatively improved by 45.09%, 39.14%, and 0.47% on average; compared to recurrent neural network (RNN) series models, the improvements are 18.91%, 15.77%, and 0.18% on average; compared to graph convolution series models, the improvements are 21.31%, 16.65%, and 0.21% on average; and compared to Transformer series models, the improvements are 6.57%, 6.23%, and 0.05% on average. The model’s general applicability and good performance in transportation speed scenarios were verified through a multi-step experiment conducted on the transportation speed dataset.

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.

The existing short-term traffic flow prediction model fails to consider the analysis of the asynchronous temporal and spatial characteristics of the traffic flow, which leads to the prediction accuracy is difficult to meet the requirements of refined traffic control. Thus, a short-term traffic flow prediction method based on the asynchronous temporal and spatial correlation was proposed in this paper. Firstly, based on Pearson-dynamic time warping method, the trend correlation and distance correlation were calculated respectively in predicted link and associated link, then the results of dynamic time warping were standardized, and discrete degree analysis was carried out on the two kinds of correlation value, evaluation index was designed based on variance of road traffic flow correlation, through the SVM method realizing the closed-loop optimization in the selection process of associated links; Secondly, a traffic flow prediction model based on TPD-LSTM was constructed by long and short term memory neural network. Finally, a link of Yusha Road of Xinhua Avenue in Chengdu was selected as the target link for example analysis, the results show that the prediction accuracy of TPD-LSTM improves to 89.62%.

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.

Real‐time expressway traffic flow prediction is always an important research field of intelligent transportation, which is conducive to inducing and managing traffic flow in case of congestion. According to the characteristics of the traffic flow, this paper proposes a hybrid model, SSA‐LSTM‐SVR, to improve forecasting accuracy of the short‐term traffic flow. Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) decomposes the traffic flow into one principle component and three random components, and then in terms of different characteristics of these components, Long Short‐Term Memory (LSTM) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) are applied to make prediction of different components, respectively. By fusing respective forecast results, SSA‐LSTM‐SVR obtains the final short‐term predictive value. Experiments on the traffic flows of Guizhou expressway in January 2016 show that the proposed SSA‐LSTM‐SVR model has lower predictive errors and a higher accuracy and fitting goodness than other baselines. This illustrates that a hybrid model for traffic flow prediction based on components decomposition is more effective than a single model, since it can capture the main regularity and random variations of traffic flow.

Timely and accurate traffic flow information is essential for the realization of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). For the existing traffic flow prediction models, only the temporal features were extracted but the spatial features were neglects. A short-term traffic flow prediction model based on Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) and Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory Network (BiLSTM) model was proposed. The PCC was used to mine the spatial dependence of the road network, and the temporal features of traffic flow were mined using BiLSTM model. The extracted temporal and spatial features were combined to achieve short-term flow prediction. The experimental results show that the PCC-BiLSTM model has higher prediction accuracy and lower error than the prediction models considering only temporal features, which verifies the effectiveness of traffic flow prediction in consideration of both temporal and spatial characteristics.

In recent years, traffic flow prediction has attracted increasing interest from both academia and industry, and existing data-driven learning models for traffic flow prediction have achieved excellent success. However, this requires a large number of datasets for efficient model training, while it is difficult to acquire all the data from one agent, and thus data collaboration among different agents becomes an attracting trend. Moreover, with the increase in the number of agents, how to perform accurate multi-agent traffic forecasting while protecting privacy is an important issue. To address this challenge, we introduce a privacy-preserving federated learning framework. In this paper, we propose a novel Dynamic Spatio-Temporal traffic flow prediction model based on graph convolutional network (DST-GCN), which incorporates both dynamic spatial and temporal dependence of intersection traffic. In addition, we provide an improved federated learning framework with opportunistic client selection (FLoS). In the proposed FLoS protocol, we employ a FedAVG algorithm for secure parameter aggregation and design an optimal client selection algorithm to reduce the communication overhead during the transfer of model updates. Experiments based on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed DST-GCN traffic prediction model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models. And our proposed FLoS can achieve superior results while reducing communication consumption. © 2022 IEEE.

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 can guide the rational layout of land use. Accurate traffic flow prediction can provide an important basis for urban expansion planning. This paper introduces a personalized lightweight federated learning framework (PLFL) for traffic flow prediction. This framework has been improved and enhanced to better accommodate traffic flow data. It is capable of collaboratively training a unified global traffic flow prediction model without compromising the privacy of individual datasets. Specifically, a spatiotemporal fusion graph convolutional network (MGTGCN) is established as the initial model for federated learning. Subsequently, a shared parameter mechanism of federated learning is employed for model training. Customized weights are allocated to each client model based on their data features to enhance personalization during this process. In order to improve the communication efficiency of federated learning, dynamic model pruning (DMP) is introduced on the client side to reduce the number of parameters that need to be communicated. Finally, the PLFL framework proposed in this paper is experimentally validated using LPR data from Changsha city. The results demonstrate that the framework can still achieve favorable prediction outcomes even when certain clients lack data. Moreover, the communication efficiency of federated learning under this framework has been enhanced while preserving the distinct characteristics of each client, without significant interference from other clients.

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.

In order to alleviate the current urban traffic congestion pressure and provide accurate and reliable traffic condition information, it is difficult to select the optimal state parameters for the original Hidden Markov model (HMM) and the state number redundancy determined during the training process leads to the model over-provisioning. The problem of weak is integration and generalization. An improved Hidden Markov Model for traffic flow prediction is proposed to more effectively fit the actual urban road intersection traffic flow. In the calculation of the negative log-likelihood function, an Akaike information criterion (AIC) or a Bayesian information criterion (BIC) penalty term is added, and the Baum-Welch algorithm is combined to optimize the optimal state number of the model. Experiments are carried out based on the collected real traffic flow and GPS feature data. The results show that the optimized hidden Markov model is superior to the original model in the accuracy and generalization ability of traffic flow prediction.

Recently, traffic flow prediction has drawn significant attention because it is a prerequisite in intelligent transportation management in urban informatics. The massively available traffic data collected from various sensors in transportation cyber-physical systems brings the opportunities in accurately forecasting traffic trend. Recent advances in deep learning shows the effectiveness on traffic flow prediction though most of them only demonstrate the superior performance on traffic data from a single type of vehicular carriers (e.g., cars) and does not perform well in other types of vehicles. To fill this gap, in this article, we propose a wide-attention and deep-composite (WADC) model, consisting of a wide-attention module and a deep-composite module, in this article. In particular, the wide-attention module can extract global key features from traffic flows via a linear model with self-attention mechanism. The deep-composite module can generalize local key features via convolutional neural network component and long short-term memory network component. We also perform extensive experiments on different types of traffic flow datasets to investigate the performance of WADC model. Our experimental results exhibit that WADC model outperforms other existing approaches.