PURP: A Scalable System for Predicting Short-Term Urban TrafficFlow Based on License Plate Recognition Data

Accurate and efficient urban traffic flow prediction can help drivers identify road traffic conditions in real-time,consequently helping them avoid congestion and accidents to a certain extent.However,the existing methods for real-time urban traffic flow prediction focus on improving the model prediction accuracy or efficiency while ignoring the training efficiency,which results in a prediction system that lacks the scalability to integrate real-time traffic flow into the training procedure.To conduct accurate and real-time urban traffic flow prediction while considering the latest historical data and avoiding time-consuming online retraining,herein,we propose a scalable system for Predicting short-term URban traffic flow in real-time based on license Plate recognition data(PURP).First,to ensure prediction accuracy,PURP constructs the spatio-temporal contexts of traffic flow prediction from License Plate Recognition(LPR)data as effective characteristics.Subsequently,to utilize the recent data without retraining the model online,PURP uses the nonparametric method k-Nearest Neighbor(namely KNN)as the prediction framework because the KNN can efficiently identify the top-k most similar spatio-temporal contexts and make predictions based on these contexts without time-consuming model retraining online.The experimental results show that PURP retains strong prediction efficiency as the prediction period increases.