Building trust for traffic flow forecasting components in intelligent transportation systems via interpretable ensemble learning

Traffic flow forecasting constitutes a crucial component of intelligent transportation systems(ITSs).Numerous studies have been conducted for traffic flow forecasting during the past decades.However,most existing studies have concentrated on developing advanced algorithms or models to attain state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy.For real-world ITS applications,the interpretability of the developed models is extremely important but has largely been ignored.This study presents an interpretable traffic flow forecasting framework based on popular tree-ensemble algorithms.The framework comprises multiple key components integrated into a highly flexible and customizable multi-stage pipeline,enabling the seamless incorporation of various algorithms and tools.To evaluate the effectiveness of the framework,the developed tree-ensemble models and another three typical categories of baseline models,including statistical time series,shallow learning,and deep learning,were compared on three datasets collected from different types of roads(i.e.,arterial,expressway,and freeway).Further,the study delves into an in-depth interpretability analysis of the most competitive tree-ensemble models using six categories of interpretable machine learning methods.Experimental results highlight the potential of the proposed framework.The tree-ensemble models developed within this framework achieve competitive accuracy while maintaining high inference efficiency similar to statistical time series and shallow learning models.Meanwhile,these tree-ensemble models offer interpretability from multiple perspectives via interpretable machine-learning techniques.The proposed framework is anticipated to provide reliable and trustworthy decision support across various ITS applications.

Flow Direction Level Traffic Flow Prediction Based on a GCN-LSTM Combined Model

Traffic flow prediction plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems and is of great significance in the applications of traffic control and urban planning.Due to the complexity of road traffic flow data,traffic flow prediction has been one of the challenging tasks to fully exploit the spatiotemporal characteristics of roads to improve prediction accuracy.In this study,a combined flow direction level traffic flow prediction graph convolutional network(GCN)and long short-term memory(LSTM)model based on spatiotemporal characteristics is proposed.First,a GCN model is employed to capture the topological structure of the data graph and extract the spatial features of road networks.Additionally,due to the capability to handle long-term dependencies,the longterm memory is used to predict the time series of traffic flow and extract the time features.The proposed model is evaluated using real-world data,which are obtained from the intersection of Liuquan Road and Zhongrun Avenue in the Zibo High-Tech Zone of China.The results show that the developed combined GCNLSTM flow direction level traffic flow prediction model can perform better than the single models of the LSTM model and GCN model,and the combined ARIMA-LSTM model in traffic flow has a strong spatiotemporal correlation.

Expressway traffic flow prediction using chaos cloud particle swarm algorithm and PPPR model

Aiming at the real-time fluctuation and nonlinear characteristics of the expressway short-term traffic flow forecasting the parameter projection pursuit regression PPPR model is applied to forecast the expressway traffic flow where the orthogonal Hermite polynomial is used to fit the ridge functions and the least square method is employed to determine the polynomial weight coefficient c.In order to efficiently optimize the projection direction a and the number M of ridge functions of the PPPR model the chaos cloud particle swarm optimization CCPSO algorithm is applied to optimize the parameters. The CCPSO-PPPR hybrid optimization model for expressway short-term traffic flow forecasting is established in which the CCPSO algorithm is used to optimize the optimal projection direction a in the inner layer while the number M of ridge functions is optimized in the outer layer.Traffic volume weather factors and travel date of the previous several time intervals of the road section are taken as the input influencing factors. Example forecasting and model comparison results indicate that the proposed model can obtain a better forecasting effect and its absolute error is controlled within [-6,6] which can meet the application requirements of expressway traffic flow forecasting.

Hourly traffic flow forecasting using a new hybrid modelling method

Short-term traffic flow forecasting is a significant part of intelligent transportation system.In some traffic control scenarios,obtaining future traffic flow in advance is conducive to highway management department to have sufficient time to formulate corresponding traffic flow control measures.In hence,it is meaningful to establish an accurate short-term traffic flow method and provide reference for peak traffic flow warning.This paper proposed a new hybrid model for traffic flow forecasting,which is composed of the variational mode decomposition(VMD)method,the group method of data handling(GMDH)neural network,bi-directional long and short term memory(BILSTM)network and ELMAN network,and is optimized by the imperialist competitive algorithm(ICA)method.To illustrate the performance of the proposed model,there are several comparative experiments between the proposed model and other models.The experiment results show that 1)BILSTM network,GMDH network and ELMAN network have better predictive performance than other single models;2)VMD can significantly improve the predictive performance of the ICA-GMDH-BILSTM-ELMAN model.The effect of VMD method is better than that of EEMD method and FEEMD method.To conclude,the proposed model which is made up of the VMD method,the ICA method,the BILSTM network,the GMDH network and the ELMAN network has excellent predictive ability for traffic flow series.

Research on traffic flow forecasting model based on cusp catastrophe theory

This paper intends to describe the relationship between traffic parameters by using cusp catastrophe theory and to deduce highway capacity and corresponding speed forecasting value through suitable transformation of catastrophe model. The five properties of a catastrophe system are outlined briefly, and then the data collected on freeways of Zhujiang River Delta, Guangdong province, China are examined to ascertain whether they exhibit qualitative properties and attributes of the catastrophe model. The forecasting value of speed and capacity for freeway segments are given based on the catastrophe model. Furthermore, speed-flow curve on freeway is drawn by plotting out congested and uncongested traffic flow and the capacity value for the same freeway segment is also obtained from speed-flow curve to test the feasibility of the application of cusp catastrophe theory in traffic flow analysis. The calculating results of catastrophe model coincide with those of traditional traffic flow models regressed from field observed data, which indicates that the deficiency of traditional analysis of relationship between speed, flow and occupancy in two-dimension can be compensated by analysis of the relationship among speed, flow and occupancy based on catastrophe model in three-dimension. Finally, the prospects and problems of its application in traffic flow research in China are discussed.

A Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting Method Based on a Three-Layer K-Nearest Neighbor Non-Parametric Regression Algorithm

Short-term traffic flow is one of the core technologies to realize traffic flow guidance. In this article, in view of the characteristics that the traffic flow changes repeatedly, a short-term traffic flow forecasting method based on a three-layer K-nearest neighbor non-parametric regression algorithm is proposed. Specifically, two screening layers based on shape similarity were introduced in K-nearest neighbor non-parametric regression method, and the forecasting results were output using the weighted averaging on the reciprocal values of the shape similarity distances and the most-similar-point distance adjustment method. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm has improved the predictive ability of the traditional K-nearest neighbor non-parametric regression method, and greatly enhanced the accuracy and real-time performance of short-term traffic flow forecasting.

Short-term traffic flow online forecasting based on kernel adaptive filter

Considering that the prediction accuracy of the traditional traffic flow forecasting model is low,based on kernel adaptive filter(KAF)algorithm,kernel least mean square(KLMS)algorithm and fixed-budget kernel recursive least-square(FB-KRLS)algorithm are presented for online adaptive prediction.The computational complexity of the KLMS algorithm is low and does not require additional solution paradigm constraints,but its regularization process can solve the problem of regularization performance degradation in high-dimensional data processing.To reduce the computational complexity,the sparse criterion is introduced into the KLMS algorithm.To further improve forecasting accuracy,FB-KRLS algorithm is proposed.It is an online learning method with fixed memory budget,and it is capable of recursively learning a nonlinear mapping and changing over time.In contrast to a previous approximate linear dependence(ALD)based technique,the purpose of the presented algorithm is not to prune the oldest data point in every time instant but it aims to prune the least significant data point,thus suppressing the growth of kernel matrix.In order to verify the validity of the proposed methods,they are applied to one-step and multi-step predictions of traffic flow in Beijing.Under the same conditions,they are compared with online adaptive ALD-KRLS method and other kernel learning methods.Experimental results show that the proposed KAF algorithms can improve the prediction accuracy,and its online learning ability meets the actual requirements of traffic flow and contributes to real-time online forecasting of traffic flow.

Traffic simulation and forecasting system in Beijing

Transport system is a time-varying, huge and complex system. In order to have the traffic management department make pre-appropriate traffic management measures to adjust the traffic management control program, and release travel information to travelers, to provide optimal path options to ensure that the transport system operates efficiently and safely, we have to monitor the changing of the state of road traffic and to accurately evaluate the state of the traffic, then to predict the future state of traffic. This paper represents the construction of the road traffic flow simulation including the logical structure and the physical structure, and introduces the system functions of forecasting system in Beijing.

A Hybrid Forecasting Framework Based on Support Vector Regression with a Modified Genetic Algorithm and a Random Forest for Traffic Flow Prediction

The ability to perform short-term traffic flow forecasting is a crucial component of intelligent transportation systems. However, accurate and reliable traffic flow forecasting is still a significant issue due to the complexity and variability of real traffic systems. To improve the accuracy of short-term traffic flow forecasting, this paper presents a novel hybrid prediction framework based on Support Vector Regression （SVR） that uses a Random Forest （RF） to select the most informative feature subset and an enhanced Genetic Algorithm （GA） with chaotic characteristics to identify the optimal forecasting model parameters. The framework is evaluated with real-world traffic data collected from eight sensors located near the 1-605 interstate highway in California. Results show that the proposed RF- CGASVR model achieves better performance than other methods.

Improved Social Emotion Optimization Algorithm for Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting Based on Back-Propagation Neural Network

The back-propagation neural network(BPNN) is a well-known multi-layer feed-forward neural network which is trained by the error reverse propagation algorithm. It is very suitable for the complex of short-term traffic flow forecasting; however, BPNN is easy to fall into local optimum and slow convergence. In order to overcome these deficiencies, a new approach called social emotion optimization algorithm(SEOA) is proposed in this paper to optimize the linked weights and thresholds of BPNN. Each individual in SEOA represents a BPNN. The availability of the proposed forecasting models is proved with the actual traffic flow data of the 2 nd Ring Road of Beijing. Experiment of results show that the forecasting accuracy of SEOA is improved obviously as compared with the accuracy of particle swarm optimization back-propagation(PSOBP) and simulated annealing particle swarm optimization back-propagation(SAPSOBP) models. Furthermore, since SEOA does not respond to the negative feedback information, Metropolis rule is proposed to give consideration to both positive and negative feedback information and diversify the adjustment methods. The modified BPNN model, in comparison with social emotion optimization back-propagation(SEOBP) model, is more advantageous to search the global optimal solution. The accuracy of Metropolis rule social emotion optimization back-propagation(MRSEOBP) model is improved about 19.54% as compared with that of SEOBP model in predicting the dramatically changing data.